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INTRODUCTORY LECTURES 


ON 

MODERN HISTORY, 

t 

DELIVERED IN LENT TERM, MDCCCXLII. 


WITH 

THE INAUGURAL LECTURE 

DELIVERED IN DECEMBER, MDCCCXLI. 


BY 

y 

THOMAS ARNOLD, D.D., 


REGIUS PROFESSOR OF MODERN HISTORY IN THE 
UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD, 

AND HEAD MASTER OF RUGBY SCHOOL. 


SECOND EDITION. 



LONDON: 

B, FELLOWES, LUDGATE STREET. 

1843 . 


THE LIBRARY 

OF CONGRESS 

WASHINGTON 









TO THE REVEREND 


EDWARD HAWKINS, D.D, 

PROVOST OF ORIEL COLLEGE, 

ETC., ETC., ETC., 


THESE LECTURES, 

THE FIRST FRUITS OF A RENEWED CONNEXION 
WITH THE UNIVERSITY AND ITS RESIDENT MEMBERS, 
ARE INSCRIBED WITH TRUE RESPECT AND REGARD, 
BY HIS SINCERELY ATTACHED FRIEND, 


THE AUTHOR 

















- 


„ 









































The following Lectures are printed almost exactly 
as they were delivered. They were written with the 
expectation that they would be read in a room to a 
very limited audience; which may explain why the 
style in some intances is more colloquial than became 
the circumstances under which they were delivered 
actually. 


Rugby, May 5th, 1842. 










CONTENTS. 


INAUGURAL LECTURE. 


PAGE 

History often underrated.—It cannot be appreciated justly at 
once.—Definition of history.—The biography of a society. 

— Properly, the biography of a nation.—And hence, gene- 
rally, of a government.—But not always so in reality.—A 
nation’s life is twofold, partly external, and partly internal. 

— The internal life determined by its end.—This end 
moral rather than physical.—Because a nation is a sove¬ 
reign society; and must therefore be cognizant of moral 
ends; as it controls all actions.*—End of a nation’s life, its 
highest happiness.—This is the fruit of laws and institu¬ 
tions; which together form its constitution ; executive, 
legislative, and judicial.—Institutions for public instruction. 

.—Institutions relating to property.—Their great import¬ 
ance.—Instances given : primogeniture, entails, commer¬ 
cial laws, &c.—Other elements affecting national life.— 
Conclusion : the greatness of history.—What constitutes 
modern history ?—It treats of nations still living.—When 
was the English nation born ? — National personality de¬ 
pends on four great elements.—Peculiarity of modern his¬ 
tory._Its element of the German race.—Spread of this 

raC e._Is modern history the last history ?—Why it seems 

likely to be so.—Importance of its being so.—Value of 
the lessons of history.—Conclusion.1 



X 


CONTENTS. 


APPENDIX TO INAUGURAL LECTURE. 

PAGE 

Theory of the perfect state.—The supreme society must be 
moral.—Why the moral theory is objected to.—What 
should be the bond of societies.—Union of action rather 
than of belief.—When is government national?—Govern¬ 
ment speaking the voice of the nation may choose its own 
national law.—Churches may infringe individual rights.— 
Excommunication is a punishment.—All centralization has 
its dangers. — Obedience to Christian law the way to arrive 
at Christian faith.—But the end is not to be made the be¬ 
ginning.—What the real difficulty of the question is.— 
Agreement of the moral theory of a state with the true 
theory of the church.—The one seems to require the other. 

—Notice of some special objections.—The objections as¬ 
sume as true what is condemned by high authorities.— 
Confusion as to what is properly “ secular.”—Excommuni¬ 
cation a secular punishment.—In what sense our Lord’s 
kingdom was not a kingdom of this world.—Conclusion . 35 


LECTURE I. 

4 

Introductory remarks.—Contrast between ancient and modern 
history.-—Extreme voluminousness of modern history.— 
Some one particular portion to be selected.—First study it 
in a contemporary historian.—Or in those of more than 
one nation.—Other authorities next to be consulted.— 
Advantages of the university libraries.—Collections of 
treaties to be consulted.—Rymer’s Foedera. — Also col¬ 
lections of laws, &c.—Their value to the historical student. 
—Letters or other writings of great men.—Miscellaneous 
literature.—How such reading may be made practicable, 
by reading with a view to our particular object. — And yet 
will not be superficial.—What reading is superficial and 
misleading.—Remarkable example of misquotation from 
Mosheim’s Ecclesiastical History.—Which quotation has 
inadvertently been given by several successive writers.— 


CONTENTS. 


XI 


PAGE 

Shewing the danger of quoting at second-hand.—Still a 
knowledge of past times is insufficient and even incom¬ 
plete in itself, without a lively knowledge of the present. 

Good effects of a knowledge of the present, and 
generally of more than one period.—To prevent our 
wrongly valuing one period.—Especially to prevent us 
from decrying our own.—Recapitulation.—Subject of the 
ensuing lecture.. 


LECTURE II. 

i 

Two periods of modern history.—Before and after the six¬ 
teenth century.—The history of the first is simpler, of the 
second more complicated.—Historians of the first period. 

— Bede.—Study of language in history.—Importance of 
good habits of translation.—Difference of the classical and 
later Latin.—Trustworthiness of historians.—Question as 
to Bede’s accounts of miracles.—Difference between wonders 
and miracles.—Alleged miracles by far the most difficult.— 
Their external testimony defective; and also their in¬ 
ternal evidence.—They are generally to be disbelieved.— 
Perhaps with some exceptions.—But even if true they 
. cannot sanction all the opinions held by those who work 
them.—Questions belonging to the thirteenth century.— 
Questions in the study of the Chronicles.—Philip de 
Comines.—Advantages of previous classical study.—Greater 
difficulty in the study of the middle ages.—Importance of 
genealogies.—We must look backwards and forwards.— 
Examples given.—Contest for the throne of Naples.— 
Peculiar interest of the period described by Philip de 
Comines.—Contrast between him and Herodotus.—Con¬ 
clusion .91 


LECTURE III. 

Magnitude of modern history.—Its different subjects of study. 
— External history.—Geography.—Common notions of 
geography.—How it should be studied.—Examples of its 
importance.—Geography of Italy.—Tendency of the last 






CONTENTS. 


PACK 

threeeenturies.—Small states swallowed up by great ones. 
Excesses of this tendency.—First, Spain.—Spain dangerous 
to Europe.—The Austro-Spanish power.—France danger¬ 
ous to Europe.—Ascendancy of England in 1763. 

France under Napoleon.—The dominion of Napoleon. 

Its wonderful overthrow.—These are merely external 
struggles ; although often mixed up with struggles of 
principle.—The questions contained in them are econo¬ 
mical and military.—Economical questions.—Difficulty of 
supporting a war.—Temptation to raise money by loans.— 

Evils of the borrowing system.—Examples of financial 
difficulties in France and in England.—Are such evils un¬ 
avoidable ?■—Conclusion.121 

LECTURE IV. 

Difficulty of speaking on others’ professions.—How far it 
may be done with propriety.—And where we must be 
ignorant.—Whose campaigns are worth studying.—Disci¬ 
pline must conquer enthusiasm.—Will some races always 
beat others ?—Not of necessity.—Mischiefs of irregular 
warfare.—Irregular warfare not justified by the accident 
of our country’s being invaded.—Certain laws of war con¬ 
sidered.—Plundering a town taken by storm.—General 
Napier’s judgment on this point.—Of the right of block¬ 
ade.— Siege of Genoa in 1800.—Importance of amending 
bad laws.—Of wrong done in going to war.—Suspicion 
begets suspicion. — Understanding of military operations.— 
What leads to battles in particular places.—Great lines of 
road often change.—Changes in roads and fortresses.— 
Mountain warfare.—Conclusion.151 

LECTURE V. 

Transition to internal history.—General divisions of the sub¬ 
ject.—Question of many and few.—What is a popular 
party?—What is meant by the few and the many?—What 
is the good of a nation ? —Principles intermixed with one 
another.—Example of Hume.—What is the party of 





CONTENTS. 

the movement^—Not always a popular party.—Parties 
changed by time.—Example of the Guelfs and Ghibelins. 
—Dread ot extinct evils; or of such as are the weaker. 
—Analysis of internal history.—Period of religious move¬ 
ment.—Parties in England first appear in the reign of 
Elizabeth.—Three parties.—The party of the established 
church.—The party of the puritans.—Party of the Roman¬ 
ists.—Ability of Elizabeth.—Her great popularity . 

LECTURE VI. 

Church questions are often political rather than religious ; in¬ 
asmuch as they have been questions of government.— 
Questions of the priesthood are religious, but were not dis¬ 
cussed in England.—Church questions in England political, 
as the church and state were one.—Yet the church ques¬ 
tions were in form not political till the reign of James I.— 
Causes of the political movement.—Growth of the House 
of Commons.—Its growth owing to that of the nation.— 
The intellectual movement stood aloof from the political, 
being regarded by it with suspicion, especially by the reli¬ 
gious movement.— Why the purely intellectual movement 
inclined to the party upholding church authority; submit¬ 
ting to it insincerely.—State of the contest hitherto.—It 
might have been delayed, but not prevented.—Change 
wrought in the popular party; both in its religious party 
and in its political.—Elements of the antipopular party.— 
Nobleness of its best members.—Lord Falkland.—Its 
other members.—Those who are called meek and peace¬ 
able. —They have no temptation to be otherwise, and are 
not to be admired.—Other opponents of puritanism, some 
better and others worse.—Lord Falkland’s character of 
ti iese .—Results of the civil war. — Altered relations of 
church and state.—Conclusion. 


LECTURE VII. 


xm 

PAGE 


183 


215 


England after the Revolution.—Parties supporting or disliking 
it.—The popular party.—Two divisions of the opposite 



XIV 


CONTENTS. 


PAGE 


party.—One of these maintained the Revolution because it 
had changed so little ; yet the advantages involved in it 
were both great and lasting.—Treatment of Ireland bv 
the popular party.—Feelings of the opposite party towards 
France.—The poorer class unfriendly to the Revolution. 
—Parties in the eighteenth century.—Triumph of the po¬ 
pular party.—What it neglected to accomplish.— New form 
of English party.—First years of George the Third s reign. 
—The House of Commons antipopular.—How this came 
to take place. —New popular party out of Parliament.— 
The periodical press.—Separation of politics from morals. 
—Letters of Junius.—American war.—War of the French 
Revolution.—Consistency of parties.—General view of the 
movement.—Omissions of both parties.—Our judgment of 
them affected by our judgment of earlier times. —Conclu¬ 
sion . 


LECTURE VIIL 

Credibility of history.—History alone tells us of the past.— 
Whether a narrative is meant to be history.—Example 
from Sir Walter Scott’s works. — A narrative may aim 
at truth and yet be careless of fact.—Criteria of an his¬ 
torical narrative. — Ecclesiastical biographies. — Credibi¬ 
lity of writings clearly historical.—Contemporary -writers 
often overrated. — The narrative of actual witnesses.— 
Witnesses more or less perfect.—The principal actor a per¬ 
fect witness, in knowledge though not in honesty.—All 
history credible up to a certain point.—An earnest craving 
after truth the great qualification of an historian.—Truth 
when sought may be found.—The craving after truth in a 
reader enables him to estimate truth in a writer.—Examin¬ 
ation of an historians credibility, both as to style and 
matter.— As to the authorities referred to.—As a military 
historian.—As a political historian.—False notions of im¬ 
partiality.—Objection to history generally.—Uncertainty as 
to political questions.—Their laws not really uncertain, al¬ 
though often thought to be so.—Certain principles are 



CONTENTS. 


XV 


PAGE 

clearly good.—Yet can history profit us?—Or are we 
bound by an unchangeable fate?—Can we undo the effect 
of the past?—Supposed case in the French Revolution.— 

The effects of the past partly reversible.—Conclusion of 
the Lectures.—Proposed subject of the next course.— 
Conclusion.281 




















mm -.. , -. . 
















































INAUGURAL LECTURE. 


It has been often remarked that when a stranger 
enters St. Peter’s for the first time, the immediate 
impression is one of disappointment; the building 
looks smaller than he expected to find it. So it is 
with the first sight of mountains; their summits 
never seem so near the clouds as we had hoped to 
see them. But a closer acquaintance with these, 
and with other grand or beautiful objects, convinces 
us that our first impression arose not from the want 
of greatness in what we saw, but from a want of 
comprehensiveness in ourselves to grasp it. What 
we saw was not all that existed; but all that our 
untaught glance could master. As we know it 
better it remains the same, but we rise more nearly 
to its^ level: our greater admiration is but the proof 
that we are become able to appreciate it more truly. 

Something of this sort takes place I think in our 
uninstructed impressions of history. We are not in¬ 
clined to rate very highly the qualifications required 
either in the student or in the writer of it. It seems 

B 





2 


INAUGURAL LECTURE. 


to demand little more than memory in the one, and 
honesty and diligence in the other. It is, we say, 
only a record of facts; and such a work seems to 
offer no field for the imagination, or for the judg¬ 
ment, or for our powers of reasoning. History is but 
time’s follower; she does not pretend to discover, 
but merely to register what time has brought to 
light already. Eminent men have been known to 
hold this language; Johnson, whose fondness for 
biography might have taught him to judge more 
truly, entertained little respect for history. We 
cannot comprehend what we have never studied, and 
history must be content to share in the common 
portion of every thing great and good; it must be 
undervalued by a hasty observer. 

If I were to attempt to institute a comparison 
between the excellencies of history and those of 
other studies, I should be falling into the very fault 
which I have been just noticing; I might be doing 
injustice to other branches of knowledge, only be¬ 
cause I had no sufficient acquaintance with them. 
But I may be allowed to claim for history, not any 
particular rank, whether high or low, as compared 
with other studies, but simply that credit should be 
given it for containing more than a superficial view of 
it can appreciate, for having treasures, neither lying on 
the surface nor immediately below the surface,— 
treasures not to be obtained without much labour, 
yet rewarding the hardest labour amply. 

To these treasures it is my business to endeavour 
to point out the wav. A Professor of history, if I 


INAUGURAL LECTURE. 


3 


understand his duties rightly, has two principal ob¬ 
jects ; he must try to acquaint his hearers with the 
nature and value of the treasure for which they are 
searching; and, secondly, he must try to shew them 
the best and speediest method of discovering and ex¬ 
tracting it. The first of these two things may be 
done once for all; but the second must be his habi¬ 
tual employment, the business of his professorial life. 
I am now therefore not to attempt to enter upon 
the second, but to bestow my attention upon the 
first; I must try to state what is the treasure to be 
found by a search into the records of history; if we 
cannot be satisfied that it is abundant and most 
valuable, we shall care little to be instructed how to 
gain it. 

In speaking of history generally, I may appear to 
be forgetting that my proper subject is more limited; 
that it is not history simply, but modern history. I 
am perfectly aware of this, and hope not to forget it 
in my practice: but still at the outset I must trace 
the stream from its source: I must ask you to re¬ 
main with me awhile on the high ground, where the 
waters, which are hereafter to form the separate 
streams of ancient and modern history, lie as yet un¬ 
distinguished in their common parent lake. I must 
speak of history in general, in order to understand 
the better the character of any one of its particular 
species. 

The general idea of history seems to be, that it is 
the biography of a society. It does not appear to 

b 2 


4 


INAUGURAL LECTURE. 


me to be history at all, but simply biography, unless 
it finds in the persons who are its subject something 
of a common purpose, the accomplishment of which 
is the object of their common life. History is to this 
common life of many, what biography is to the life 
of an individual. Take for instance any common 
family, and its members are soon so scattered from 
one another, and are engaged in such different pur¬ 
suits, that although it is possible to write the bio¬ 
graphy of each individual, yet there can be no such 
thing, properly speaking, as the history of the family. 
But suppose all the members to be thrown together 
in one place, amidst strangers or savages, and there 
immediately becomes a common life,—an unity of 
action,—interest, and purpose, distinct from others 
around them, which renders them at once a fit sub¬ 
ject of history. Perhaps I ought not to press the 
word “ purposebecause purpose implies conscious¬ 
ness in the purposer, and a society may exist without 
being fully conscious of its own business as a society. 
But whether consciously or not, every society—so 
much is implied in the very word—must have in it 
something of community; and so far as the members 
of it are members, so far as they are each incomplete 
parts, but taken together form a whole, so far, it 
appears to me, their joint life is the proper subject 
of history. 

Accordingly we find the term history often applied 
to small and subordinate societies. We speak of the 
history of literary or scientific societies; we have 
histories of commercial bodies; histories of religious 


INAUGURAL LECTURE. 


r* 

D 


orders; histories of universities. In ali these cases 
history has to do with that which the several 
members of each of these societies have in common: 
it is, as I said, the biography of their common life. 
And it seems to me that it could not perform its 
office, if it had no distinct notion in what this com¬ 
mon life consisted. 

But if the life of every society belongs to history, 
much more does the life of that highest and sove¬ 
reign society which we call a state or a nation. 
And this in fact is considered the proper subject of 
history;—insomuch that if we speak of it simply, 
without any qualifying epithet, we understand by it 
not the biography of any subordinate society, but of 
some one or more of the great national societies of 
the human race, whatever political form their bond 
of connexion may assume. And thus we get a 
somewhat stricter definition of history properly so 
called; we may describe it not simply as the bio¬ 
graphy of a society, but as the biography of a poli¬ 
tical society or commonwealth. 

Now in a commonwealth or state, that common 
life which I have ventured to call the proper subject 
of history, finds its natural expression in those who 
are invested with the state’s government. Here we 
have the varied elements which exist in the body of 
a nation reduced as it were to an intelligible unity: 
the state appears to have a personal existence in its 
government. And where that government is lodged 
in the hands of a single individual, then biography 
and history seem to melt into one another, inasmuch 



6 


INAUGURAL LECTURE. 


as one and the same person combines in himself his 
life as an individual, and the common life of his 
nation. » 

That common life then which we could not find 
represented by any private members of the state, is 
brought to a head, as it were, and exhibited intel¬ 
ligibly and visibly in the government. And thus 
history has generally taken governments as the pro¬ 
per representatives of nations; it has recorded the 
actions and fortunes of kings or national councils, 
and has so appeared to fulfil its appointed duty, that 
of recording the life of a commonwealth. Nor is 
this theoretically other than true; the idea of go¬ 
vernment is no doubt that it should represent the 
person of the state, desiring those ends, and contriv¬ 
ing those means to compass them, which the state 
itself, if it could act for itself, ought to desire and to 
contrive. But practically and really this has not 
been so: governments have less represented the 
state than themselves: the individual life has so 
predominated in them over the common life, that 
what in theory is history, because it is recording 
the actions of a government, and the government 
represents the nation, becomes in fact no more than 
biography; it does but record the passions and ac¬ 
tions of an individual, who is abusing the state’s 
name for the purposes of selfish, rather than public 
good. 

We see then in practice how history has been be¬ 
guiled, so to speak, from its proper business, and has 
ceased to describe the life of a commonwealth. For 


INAUGURAL LECTURE. 


7 


taking governments as the representatives of com¬ 
monwealths, which in idea they are, history has 
watched their features, as if from them might be 
drawn the portrait of their respective nations. But 
as in this she has been deceived, so her portraits 
were necessarily unlike what they were intended to 
represent; they were not portraits of the common¬ 
wealth, but of individuals. 

Again, the life of a commonwealth, like that of 
an individual, has two parts; it is partly external 
and partly internal. Its external life is seen in its 
dealings with other commonwealths; its internal 
life, in its dealings with itself. Now in the former 
of these, government must ever be in a certain de¬ 
gree the representative of the nation: there must 
here be a community of interest, at least up to a 
certain point, and something also of a community of 
feeling. If a government be overthrown by a fo¬ 
reign enemy, the nation shares in the evils of the 
conquest and in the shame of the defeat; if it be 
victorious, the nation, even if not enriched with the 
spoils, is yet proud to claim its portion of the glory. 
And thus in describing a government’s external life, 
that is, its dealings with other governments, history 
has remained, and could not but remain, true to its 
proper subject: for in foreign war the government 
must represent more than its individual self; here 
it really must act and suffer, not altogether but yet 
to a considerable degree, for and with the nation. 

I have assumed that the external life of a state is 


8 


INAUGURAL LECTURE. 


seen in little else than in its wars; and this I fear is 
true, with scarcely any qualification. A state acting 
out of itself is mostly either repelling violence, or 
exercising it upon others; the friendly intercourse 
between nation and nation is for the most part ne¬ 
gative. A nation’s external life then is displayed in 
its wars, and here history has been sufficiently busy: 
the wars of the human race have been recorded, 
when the memory of every thing else has perished. 
Nor is this to be wondered at; for the external life 
of nations, as of individuals, is at once the most easily 
known and the most generally interesting. Action, 
in the common sense of the word, is intelligible to 
every one; its effects are visible and sensible; in 
itself, from its necessary connexion with outward 
nature, it is often highly picturesque, while the qua¬ 
lities displayed in it are some of those which by an 
irresistible instinct we are most led to admire. Abi¬ 
lity in the adaptation of means to ends, courage, 
endurance, and perseverance, the complete con¬ 
quest over some of the most universal weaknesses 
of our nature, the victory over some of its most 
powerful temptations, these are qualities displayed 
in action, and particularly in war. And it is our 
deep sympathy with these qualities, much more 
than any fondness for scenes of horror and blood, 
which has made descriptions of battles, whether in 
poetry or history, so generally attractive. He who 
can read these without interest, differs, I am inclined 
to think, from the mass of mankind rather for the 


INAUGURAL LECTURE. 


9 


worse than for the better; he rather wants some 
noble qualities which other men have, than possesses 
some which other men want. 

But still we have another life besides that of out- 
ward action ; and it is this inward life after all,which 
determines the character of the actions and of the 
man. And how eagerly do we desire in those great 
men whose actions fill so large a space in history, to 
know not only what they did but what they were: 
how much do we prize their letters or their recorded 
words, and not least such words as are uttered in 
their most private moments, which enable us to look 
as it were into the very nature of that mind, whose 
distant effects we know to be so marvellous. But a 
nation has its inward life no less than an individual, 
and from this its outward life also is characterized. 
For what does a nation effect by war, but either the 
securing of its existence, or the increasing of its 
power? We honour the heroism shewn in accom¬ 
plishing these objects; but power, nay even exist¬ 
ence, are not ultimate ends; the question may be 
asked of every created being why he should live at 
all, and no satisfactory answer can be given, if his 
life does not, by doing God’s will consciously or un¬ 
consciously, tend to God’s glory and to the good of 
his brethren. And if a nation’s annals contain the 
record of deeds ever so heroic, done in defence of 
the national freedom or existence, still we may re¬ 
quire that the freedom or the life so bravely main¬ 
tained should be also employed for worthy purposes; 
or else even the names of Thermopylae and of Mor- 


10 


■ INAUGURAL LECTURE. 


garten become in after years a reproach rather than 
a glory. 

Turning then to regard the inner life of a nation, 
we cannot but see that here, as in the life of an in¬ 
dividual, it is determined by the nature of its ulti¬ 
mate end. What is a nation’s main object, is there¬ 
fore a question which must be asked, before we can 
answer whether its inner life, and consequently its 
outward life also, which depends upon the inner life, 
is to be called good or evil. Now it does not seem 
easy to conceive that a nation can have any other 
object than that which is the highest object of every 
individual in it; if it can, then the attribute of 
sovereignty which is inseparable from nationality 
becomes the dominion of an evil principle. For 
suppose for instance that a nation as such is not cog¬ 
nizant of the notions of justice and humanity, but 
that its highest object is wealth or dominion or se¬ 
curity. It then follows that the sovereign power in 
human life, which can influence the minds and com¬ 
pel the actions of us all, is a power altogether un¬ 
moral ; and if unmoral, and yet commanding the 
actions of moral beings, then evil. Again, if being- 
cognizant of the notions of justice and humanity it 
deliberately prefers other objects to them, then here 
is the dominion of an evil principle still more clearly. 
But if it be cognizant of them and appreciates them 
rightly, then it must see that they are more to be 
followed than any objects of outward advantage; 
then it acknowledges moral ends as a higher good 
than physical ends, and thus, as we said, agrees with 


INAUGURAL LECTURE. 


11 


every good individual man in its estimate of the 
highest object of national no less than of individual 
life. 

It is sometimes urged, that although this be true 
of individuals, yet it is not true of every society; 
that we constantly see instances of the contrary; 
that, for example, the highest object of the Royal 
Society as a society is the advancement of science, 
although to the individuals of that society a moral 
and religious object would be incomparably of higher 
value. Why then may not the highest object of a 
nation, as such, be self-defence, or wealth, or any 
other outward good, although every individual of the 
nation puts a moral object before any mere external 
benefits? The answer to this is simply because a 
nation is a sovereign society, and it is something 
monstrous that the ultimate power in human life 
should be destitute of a sense of right and wrong. 
For there being a right and a wrong in all or almost 
all our actions, the power which can command or 
forbid these actions without an appeal to any human 
tribunal higher than itself, must surely have a sense 
not only of the right or wrong of this particular ac¬ 
tion now commanded or forbidden, but generally of 
the comparative value of different ends, and thus of 
the highest end of all; lest perchance while com¬ 
manding what is in itself good, it may command it 
at a time or in a degree to interfere with some 
higher good; and then it is in fact commanding 
evil. And that the power of government is thus 
extensive and sovereign seems admitted, not only 


12 


INAUGURAL LECTURE. 


historically, inasmuch as no known limits to it have 
ever been affixed, nor indeed can be, without contra¬ 
diction, but also by our common sense and language, 
which feels and expresses that government does, and 
may, and ought to interpose in a great variety of 
matters; various for instance, as education and the 
raising of a revenue, and the making of war or 
peace; matters which it would be very difficult to 
class together under any one common head, except 
such as I have assigned as the end of political so¬ 
ciety, the highest good, namely, of the whole society 
or nation. And our common notions of the differ¬ 
ence between a government and a police, between a 
government and an army, are alone sufficient to shew 
the fallacy of the attempted comparison. It is the 
ultimate object of a police to provide for the security 
of our bodies and goods against violence at home, as 
it is the object of an army to secure them against 
violence from without. Policemen and soldiers have 
individually another and a higher object; but the 
societies, if I may so call them, the institutions of a . 
police and an army, have not. And who does not 
see that for this very reason the police and the army 
are not sovereign societies, but essentially subordi¬ 
nate ;—that because they are not cognizant of moral 
ends, therefore they are incapable of directing men’s 
conduct in the last resort;—and that therefore they 
are themselves subject to a higher power, namely, 
that of the government, the representative of the 
national life ? If neither is the government cognizant 
of moral ends, then it too must be subject to some 


INAUGURAL LECTURE. 


18 


higher power, which is a contradiction in terms; or 
else, as I said before, it cannot surely be the ordi¬ 
nance of God; and if not, can it be otherwise than 
evil ? 

Perhaps it was hardly necessary to dwell so long 
on this point before my present hearers; yet the 
opposite doctrine to that which I have been assert¬ 
ing has been maintained, since Warburton, bynames 
deserving of no common respect; and what seems to 
me the truth, was necessary to be stated, because on 
it depends our whole view of history, so far as history 
is more than a mere record of wars. In wars no 
doubt the end sought is no more than a nation’s se¬ 
curity or power; in other words, that she may de- 
velope her internal life at all, or develope it with 
vigour. But we must recognise some worthy end 
for the life thus preserved, or strengthened; other¬ 
wise it is but given in vain. 

That end appears to be the promoting and se¬ 
curing a nation’s highest happiness; so we must ex¬ 
press it in its most general formula; but under the 
most favourable combination of circumstances, this 
same end is conceived and expressed more purely, as 
the setting forth God’s glory by doing His appointed 
work. And that work for a nation seems to imply 
not only the greatest possible perfecting of the 
natures of its individual members, but also the per¬ 
fecting of all those acts which are done, by the na¬ 
tion collectively, or by the government standing in 
its place, and faithfully representing it. For that 
conceivably a nation may have duties of vast im- 


14 


INAUGURAL LECTURE. 


portance to perform in its national capacity, and 
which cannot be effected by its individual members, 
however excellent—duties of its external life of a 
very different sort from ordinary wars, even when 
justifiable, seems to follow at once from the con¬ 
sideration that every single state is but a member of 
a greater body; that is, immediately, of the great 
body of organized states throughout the world, and 
still farther, of the universal family of mankind, and 
that it is a member of both according to the will of 
God. 

But perfection in outward life is the fruit of per¬ 
fection in the life within us. And a nation’s inner 
life consists in its action upon and within itself. 
Now in order to the perfecting of itself, it must 
follow certain principles, and acquire certain habits; 
in other words, it must have its laws and institutions 
adapted to the accomplishment of its great end. 
On these the characters of its people so mainly de¬ 
pend, that if these be faulty, the whole inner life is 
corrupted; if these be good, it is likely to go on health¬ 
fully. The history then of a nation’s internal life, is 
the history of its institutions and of its laws, both of 
which are included under the term laics , in the com¬ 
prehensive sense of that word, as used by the Greeks; 
but for us it is most convenient to distinguish them. 
Let us consider how much these two terms include. 

I would first say that by institutions I wish to 
understand, such offices, orders of men, public bodies, 
settlements of property, customs, or regulations, con¬ 
cerning matters of general usage, as do not owe their 


INAUGURAL LECTURE. 


15 


existence to any express law or law’s, but having 
originated in various ways at a period of remote an¬ 
tiquity, are already parts of the national system, at 
the very beginning of our historical view of it, and 
are recognised by all actual laws, as being themselves 
a kind of primary condition on which all recorded 
legislation proceeds. And I would confine the term 
laws to the enactments of a known legislative power, 
at a certain known period. 

Here then, in the institutions and legislation of a 
country, the principles and rules and influencing powers 
of its internal life, w 7 e have one of the noblest sub¬ 
jects of history. For by one or both of these, ge¬ 
nerally from institutions modified by laws, comes in 
the first place what we call the constitution of a 
country; that is, to speak generally, its peculiar ar¬ 
rangement of the executive, legislative, and judicial 
powers of government. The bearing of the consti¬ 
tution of a country upon its internal life is twofold; 
direct and indirect. For example, the effect of any 
particular arrangement of the judicial power is seen 
directly in the greater or less purity with which 
justice is administered; but there is a farther effect, 
and one of the highest importance, in its furnishing 
to a greater or less portion of the nation one of the 
best means of moral and intellectual culture, the op¬ 
portunity, namely, of exercising the functions of a 
judge. I mean, that to accustom a number of per¬ 
sons to the intellectual exercise of attending to, and 
weighing, and comparing evidence, and to the moral 
exercise of being placed in a high and responsible 


16 


INAUGURAL LECTURE. 


situation, invested with one of God’s own attributes, 
that of judgment, and having to determine with 
authority between truth and falsehood, right and 
wrong, is to furnish them with very high means of 
moral and intellectual culture, in other words, it is 
providing them with one of the highest kinds of 
education. And thus a judicial constitution may 
secure a pure administration of justice, and yet fail 
as an engine of national cultivation, when it is vested 
in the hands of a small body of professional men, 
like the old French parliaments. While, on the 
other hand, it may communicate the judicial office 
very widely, as by our system of juries, and thus may 
educate, if I may so speak, a very large portion of 
the nation, but yet may not succeed in obtaining the 
greatest certainty of just legal decisions. I do not 
mean that our jury system does not succeed, but it 
is conceivable that it should not. So in the same 
way different arrangements of the executive and 
legislative powers should be always regarded in this 
twofold aspect; as effecting their direct objects, 
good government and good legislation; and as 
educating the nation more or less extensively, by af¬ 
fording to a greater or less number of persons practi¬ 
cal lessons in governing and legislating. 

I have noticed the political constitution of a 
country, the first of all its institutions, because it is 
the one which from its prominence first attracts our 
notice. Others, however, although less conspicuous, 
have an influence not less important. Of these are 
all such institutions or laws as relate to public in- 


INAUGURAL LECTURE. 


17 


struction in the widest sense, whether of the young, 
or of persons of all ages. There are certain prin¬ 
ciples which the State wishes to inculcate on all its 
members, certain habits which it wishes to form, a, 
certain kind and degree of knowledge which it 
wishes to communicate; such, namely, as bear more 
or less immediately on its great end, its own intel¬ 
lectual and moral perfection, arising out of the per¬ 
fection of its several members. Now as far as this 
instruction, using the term again in its widest sense, 
and including under it the formation of habits, as far 
as this instruction is applied to the young, it goes 
under the name of education; as far as it regards 
persons of all ages, it generally takes the form of re¬ 
ligion. Even in heathen countries, where direct 
teaching was no part of the business of the ministers 
of religion, still the solemn festivals, the games, the 
sacrifices, the systems of divination, nay, the very 
temples themselves, had an undoubted moral effect 
on the people, whether for good or for evil, and were 
designed to have it; so that in the larger sense al¬ 
ready claimed for the word, they may be called a sort 
of public instruction. In Christian countries, re¬ 
ligion at once inculcates truths and forms habits; 
the first, by what I may be allowed to call prophe¬ 
sying or direct teaching; the second, by this also, 
and farther by the ritual and social agency of the 
Church. Nor need I add one word to my present 
audience to impress the vast importance of this one 
of a nation’s institutions. 

Neither let it be thought an abrupt or painful de- 

c 


18 


INAUGURAL LECTURE. 


scent, if from the mention of public instruction in its 
very highest form, I pass to another class of institu¬ 
tions and laws, which some may look upon as re¬ 
garding only the lowest part of a state’s external life; 
those institutions and laws, I mean, which affect the 
acquisition and the distribution of property. I grant 
that the w T ay in which economical questions are 
sometimes discussed may create a prejudice against 
the study of them; excusably, it may be, yet not 
over reasonably. For in economical works the eco- 
nomical end alone is regarded, without taking ac¬ 
count of its bearings upon the higher or political end 
to which it should minister. But surely this, as it 
would be very faulty in a statesman, is not at all 
faulty in one who professes only to be an economist; 
it does not seem to me that in discussing any sub¬ 
ordinate science, its relations with the supreme or 
architectonical science fall properly under our con¬ 
sideration. We are but to send in our report of the 
facts within our special subject of enquiry; to legis¬ 
late upon this report belongs to a higher department. 
It is very useful to consider economical questions in 
a purely economical point of view, in order to dis¬ 
cover the truth respecting them merely as points of 
economy; although it by no means follows that what 
is expedient economically, is expedient also politic¬ 
ally, because it may well be that another end rather 
than the economical may best further the attainment 
of the great end of the commonwealth. But no 
man who thinks seriously about it can doubt the 
vast moral importance of institutions and laws re- 


INAUGURAL LECTURE. 


19 


lating to property. It has been said that the pos¬ 
session of property implies education; that is, that it 
calls forth and exercises so many valuable qualities, 
forethought, love of order, justice, beneficence, and 
wisdom in the use of power, that he who possesses 
it cannot live in the extreme of ignorance or 
brutality: he has learnt unavoidably some of the 
higher lessons of humanity. It is at least certain 
that the utter want of property offers obstacles to 
the moral and intellectual education of persons la¬ 
bouring under it, such as no book teaching can in 
ordinary circumstances overcome. Laws therefore 
which affect directly or indirectly the distribution of 
property, affect also a nation’s internal life very 
deeply. It is not a matter of indifference whether 
the laws of inheritance direct the equal distribution 
of a man’s property among all his children, or whether 
they establish a right of primogeniture; whether they 
fix the principle of succession independently of indi¬ 
vidual discretion, or whether they leave a man the 
power of disposing of his property by will according 
to his own pleasure. Nor again is it indifferent 
whether the law favours the stability of property or 
its rapid circulation; whether it encourages entails, 
or forbids them; whether it determines that land 
held in mortmain is an advantage or an evil. I 
might allude to the importance of commercial laws, 
whether for good or for evil; and to that fruitful 
source of political disputes in modern times, the 
amount and character of a country’s taxation. But 
it is enough to have just noticed these points, in 

c 2 


20 


INAUGURAL LECTURE. 


order to shew that economical questions, or such as 
relate to wealth or property, demand the careful at¬ 
tention of the historian, inasmuch as they influence 
most powerfully a nation’s moral and political con¬ 
dition, that is, in the highest sense of the terms, its 
welfare or its misery. 

Hitherto we have considered the history of a 
nation’s natural life as busied with its institutions 
and laws ; and as tracing their effects in their three 
great divisions of, 1st, politics, 2nd, instruction 
in the widest sense, and 3rd, economy. Yet life, 
whether individual or national, is subject to a variety 
of irregular influences, such as originate in no known 
law. Unless the national will, as at Sparta, attempt 
to absorb into itself the wills of individuals, so that 
they shall do nothing, suffer nothing, desire nothing, 
but according to the bidding of law, there must 
always exist along with the most vigorous positive 
institutions and laws, a great mass of independent 
individual action and feeling, which cannot be with¬ 
out its influence on the national virtue and happiness. 
To these spontaneous elements belong science, art, 
and literature, which may indeed be encouraged by 
institutions and laws, or discouraged, but yet on the 
whole their origin and growth in any given country 
has been owing to individuals rather than to the 
nation, or more properly perhaps to causes external 
to both, to those causes which have given genius and 
taste to some races of mankind in remarkable 
measure, and have denied them to others; causes 
which have first prepared the fuel ready for kindling, 


INAUGURAL LECTURE. 


21 


and then have sent the spark to light it up into a 
blaze. No man can say why the great discoveries of 
science were made only at the time and in the 
country when and where they were made actually: 
why the compass was withheld from the navigation 
of the Roman Empire, but was already in existence 
when it was needed to aid the genius of Columbus : 
why printing was invented in time to preserve that 
portion of Greek literature which still survived in 
the fifteenth century, but was not known early 
enough to prevent the irreparable mischiefs of the 
Latin storming of Constantinople in the thirteenth: 
why the steam engine, triumphing over time and 
space, was denied to the stirring spirit of the six¬ 
teenth century, and reserved to display its wonderful 
works only to the nineteenth. 

Other influences may possibly be named which 
have their effect on the national character and 
happiness; but I may be pardoned if in so vast a 
field something should be omitted unconsciously, and 
something necessarily passed over, not to encroach 
too largely on your time and patience. But enough 
has been said I think to shew that history contains 
no mean treasures: that as being the biography of a 
nation, it partakes of the richness and variety of 
those elements which make up a nation’s life. 
Whatever there is of greatness in the final cause of 
all human thought and action, God’s glory and man’s 
perfection, that is the measure of the greatness of 
history. Whatever there is of variety and intense 
interest in human nature, in its elevation, whether 


22 


INAUGURAL LECTURE. 


proud as by nature or sanctified as by God’s grace; 
in its suffering, whether blessed or unblessed, a 
martyrdom or a judgment; in its strange reverses, 
in its varied adventures, in its yet more varied powers, 
its courage and its patience, its genius and its wisdom, 
its justice and its love, that also is the measure of 
the interest and variety of history. The treasures 
indeed are ample, but we may more reasonably fear 
whether we may have strength and skill to win them. 

I have thus far spoken of history in the abstract; 
at least of history so far as it relates to civilized 
nations, with no reference to any one time or country 
more than to another. But, as I said before, I must 
not forget that my particular business is not history 
generally, but modern history; and without going 
farther into details than is suitable to the present 
occasion, it may yet be proper, as we have considered 
what history in general has to offer, so now to see 
also whether there is any peculiar attraction in 
modern history: and whether ancient and modern 
history in the popular sense of the words differ only 
in this, that the one relates to events which took 
place before a certain period, and the other to events 
which have happened since that period ; or whether 
there is a real distinction between them, grounded 
upon an essential difference in their nature. If they 
differ only chronologically, it is manifest that the line 
which separates them is purely arbitrary: and we 
might equally well fix the limit of ancient history 
at the fall of the Babylonian monarchy, and embrace 
the whole fortunes of Greece and Rome within what 


INAUGURAL LECTURE. 


23 


we choose to call modern; or, on the other hand, we 
might carry on ancient history to the close of the 
fifteenth century, and place the beginning of modern 
history at that memorable period which witnessed 
the expulsion of the Moors from Spain, the discovery 
of America, and, only a few years later, the Reform¬ 
ation. 

It seems, however, that there is a real difference 
between ancient and modern history, which justifies 
the limit usually assigned to them; the fall, namely, 
of the western empire; that is to say, the fall of the 
western empire separates the subsequent period from 
that which preceded it by a broader line, so far as 
we are concerned, than can be found at any other 
point either earlier or later. For the state of things 
now in existence, dates its origin from the fall of 
the western empire; so far we can trace up the 
fortunes of nations which are still flourishing; history 
so far is the biography of the living ; beyond, it is 
but the biography of the dead. In our own island 
we see this most clearly : our history clearly begins 
with the coming over of the Saxons; the Britons 
and Romans had lived in our country, but they are 
not our fathers; we are connected with them as men 
indeed, but nationally speaking, the history of Caesar’s 
invasion has no more to do with us, than the natural 
history of the animals which then inhabited our 
forests. We, this great English nation, whose race 
and language are now overrunning the earth from one 
end of it to the other,—we were born when the 
white horse of the Saxons had established his do- 





24 


INAUGURAL LECTURE. 


minion from the Tweed to the Tamar. So far we 
can trace our blood, our language, the name and 
actual divisions of our country, the beginnings of 
some of our institutions. So far our national 
identity extends, so far history is modern, for it 
treats of a life which was then, and is not yet ex¬ 
tinguished. 

And if we cross the channel, w T hat is the case 
with our great neighbour nation of France ? Roman 
Gaul had existed since the Christian eera; the origin 
of Keltic Gaul is older than history : but France 
and Frenchmen came into being when the Franks 
established themselves west of the Rhine. Not that 
before that period the fathers of the majority of the 
actual French people were living on the Elbe or the 
Saal; for the Franks were numerically few, and 
throughout the south of France the population is 
predominantly, and much more than predominantly, of 
Gallo-Roman origin. But Clovis and his Germans 
struck root so deeply, and their institutions wrought 
such changes, that the identity of France cannot be 
carried back beyond their invasion; the older ele¬ 
ments no doubt have helped greatly to characterize 
the existing nation; but they cannot be said by 
themselves to be that nation. 

The essential character then of modern history 
appears to be this; that it treats of national life still 
in existence: it commences with that period when 
all the great elements of the existing state of things 
had met together; so that subsequent changes, great 
as they have been, have only combined or disposed 


INAUGURAL LECTURE. 


25 


these same elements differently; they have added 
to them no new one. By the great elements of 
nationality, I mean race, language, institutions, and 
religion; and it will be seen that throughout Europe 
all these four may be traced up, if not actually in 
every case to the fall of the western empire, yet to 
the dark period which followed that fall, while in no 
case are all the four to be found united before it. 
Otherwise, if we allow the two first of these ele¬ 
ments without the third aud fourth to constitute 
national identity, especially when combined with 

i 

sameness of place, we must then say that the 
northern countries of Europe have no ancient his¬ 
tory, inasmuch as they have been inhabited from the 
earliest times by the same race speaking what is 
radically the same language. But it is better not to 
admit national identity, till the two elements of in¬ 
stitutions and religion, or at any rate one of them, 
be added to those of blood and language. At all 
events it cannot be doubted, that as soon as the four 
are united, the national personality becomes com¬ 
plete. 

It cannot be doubted then that modern history so 
defined is especially interesting to us, inasmuch as it 
treats only of national existence not yet extinct: it 
contains, so to speak, the first acts of a great drama 
now actually in the process of being represented, and 
of which the catastrophe is still future. But besides 
this personal interest, is there nothing in modern 
history of more essential difference from ancient— 
of difference such as would remain, even if we could 


26 INAUGURAL LECTURE. 

conceive ourselves living in some third period of his¬ 
tory, when existing nations had passed away like 
those which we now call ancient, and when our 
modern history would have become what the history 
of Greece and Rome is to us ? 

Such a difference does characterize what we now 
call modern history, and must continue to charac¬ 
terize it for ever. Modern history exhibits a fuller 
developement of the human race, a richer com¬ 
bination of its most remarkable elements. We our¬ 
selves are one of the most striking examples of this. 
We derive scarcely one drop of our blood from 
Roman fathers; we are in our race strangers to 
Greece, and strangers to Israel. But morally how 
much do we derive from all three: in this respect 
their life is in a manner continued in ours ; their in¬ 
fluences, to say the least, have not perished. 

Here then we have, if I may so speak, the ancient 
world still existing, but with a new element added, 
the element of our English race. And that this ele¬ 
ment is an important one, cannot be doubted for an 
instant. Our English race is the German race; for 
though our Norman fathers had learnt to speak a 
stranger’s language, yet in blood, as we know, they 
were the Saxons’ brethren : both alike belong to the 
Teutonic or German stock. Now the importance of 
this stock is plain from this, that its intermixture with 
the Keltic and Roman races at the fall of the western 
empire has changed the whole face of Europe. It 
is doubly remarkable, because the other elements of 
modern history are derived from the ancient world. 


INAUGURAL LECTURE. 


27 


If we consider the Roman empire in the fourth 
century of the Christian sera, we shall find in it 
Christianity, we shall find in it all the intellectual 
treasures of Greece, all the social and political 
wisdom of Rome. What was not there, was simply 
the German race, and the peculiar qualities which 
characterize it. This one addition was of such 
power, that it changed the character of the whole 
mass : the peculiar stamp of the middle ages is un¬ 
doubtedly German; the change manifested in the 
last three centuries has been owing to the revival of 
the older elements with greater power, so that the 
German element has been less manifestly pre¬ 
dominant. But that element still preserves its force, 
and is felt for good or for evil in almost every 
country of the civilized world. 

We will pause for a moment to observe over how 
large a portion of the earth this influence is now ex¬ 
tended. It affects more or less the whole west of 
Europe, from the head of the Gulf of Bothnia to 
the most southern promontory of Sicily, from the 
Oder and the Adriatic to the Hebrides and to Lisbon. 
It is true that the language spoken over a large 
portion of this space is not predominantly German; 
but even in France and Italy and Spain, the influence 
of the Franks, Burgundians, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, 
and Lombards, while it has coloured even the lan¬ 
guage, has in blood and institutions left its mark 
legibly and indelibly. Germany, the Low Countries, 
Switzerland for the most part, Denmark, Norway 
and Sweden, and our own islands, are all in language, 


28 


INAUGURAL LECTURE. 


in blood, and in institutions, German most decidedly. 
But all South America is peopled with Spaniards 
and Portuguese, all North America and all Australia 
with Englishmen. I say nothing of the prospects 
and influence of the German race in Africa and in 

x 

India:—it is enough to say that half of Europe, and 
all America and Australia, are German more or less 
completely, in race, in language, or in institutions, or 
in all. 

Modern history then differs from ancient history 
in this, that while it preserves the elements of 
ancient history undestroyed, it has added others to 
them; and these, as we have seen, elements of no 
common power. But the German race is not the 
only one which has been thus added ; the Sclavonic 
race is another new element, which has overrun the 
east of Europe, as the German has overrun the west. 
And when we consider that the Sclavonic race wields 
the mighty empire of Russia, we may believe that 
its future influence on the condition of Europe and 
of the world may be far greater than that which it 
exercises now. 

i 

This leads us to a view of modern history, which 
cannot indeed be confidently relied on, but which 
still impresses the mind with an imagination, if not 
with a conviction, of its reality. I mean, that 
modern history appears to be not only a step in 
advance of ancient history, but the last step; it 
appears to bear marks of the fulness of time, as if 
there would be no future history beyond it. For the 
last eighteen hundred years, Greece has fed the 


INAUGURAL LECTURE. 


29 


human intellect; Rome, taught by Greece and im¬ 
proving upon her teacher, has been the source of 
law and government and social civilization; and 
what neither Greece nor Rome could furnish, the 
perfection of moral and spiritual truth, has been 
given by Christianity. The changes which have 
been wrought have arisen out of the reception of 
these elements by new races; races endowed with 
such force of character that what was old in itself, 
when exhibited in them, seemed to become some¬ 
thing new. But races so gifted are and have been 
from the beginning of the world few in number: the 
mass of mankind have no such power; they either 
receive the impression of foreign elements so com¬ 
pletely that their own individual character is ab¬ 
sorbed, and they take their whole being from 
without; or being incapable of taking in higher ele¬ 
ments, they dwindle away when brought into the 
presence of a more powerful life, and become at last 
extinct altogether. Now looking anxiously round 
the world for any new races which may receive the 
seed (so to speak) of our present history into a 
kindly yet a vigorous soil, and may reproduce it, the 
same and yet new, for a future period, we know not 
where such a are to be found. Some appear ex¬ 
hausted, others incapable, and yet the surface of the 
whole globe is known to us. The Roman colonies 

a What may be done hereafter by the Sclavonic nations, is not 
prejudged by this statement; because the Sclavonic nations are 
elements of our actual history, although their powers may be as 
yet only partially developed. 


30 INAUGURAL LECTURE. 

along the banks of the Rhine and Danube looked 
out on the country beyond those rivers as we look 
up at the stars, and actually see with our eyes a 
world of which we know nothing. The Romans 
knew that there was a vast portion of earth which 
they did not know; how vast it might be, was a 
part of its mysteries. But to us all is explored: 
imagination can hope for no new Atlantic island to 
realize the vision of Plato’s Critias : no new conti¬ 
nent peopled by youthful races, the destined restorers 
of our worn-out generations. Everywhere the 
search has been made, and the report has been re¬ 
ceived ; we have the full amount of earth’s resources 

• 

before us, and they seem inadequate to supply life 
for a third period of human history. 

I am well aware that to state this as a matter of 
positive belief would be the extreme of presumption; 
there may be nations reserved hereafter for great 
purposes of God’s providence, whose fitness for their 
appointed work will not betray itself, till the work 
and the time for doing it be come. There was a 
period perhaps when the ancestors of the Athenians 
were to be no otherwise distinguished from their 
barbarian neighbours than by some finer taste in the 
decorations of their arms, and something of a loftier 
spirit in the songs which told of the exploits of their 
warriors; and when Aristotle heard that Rome had 
been taken by the Gauls, he knew not*that its total 
destruction would have been a greater loss to man¬ 
kind than the recent overthrow of Veii. But with¬ 
out any presumptuous confidence, if there be any 


INAUGURAL LECTURE. 


31 


signs, however uncertain, that we are living in 
the latest period of the world’s history, that no 
other races remain behind to perform what we 
have neglected or to restore what we have mined, 
then indeed the interest of modern history does 
become intense, and the importance of not wasting 
the time still left to us may well be called in¬ 
calculable. When an army’s last reserve has been 
brought into action, every single soldier knows that 
he must do his duty to the utmost; that if he can¬ 
not win the battle now, he must lose it. So if our 
existing nations are the last reserve of the world, its 
fate may be said to be in their hands—God’s work 
on earth will be left undone if they do not do it. 

But our future course must be hesitating or mis¬ 
taken, if we do not know what course has brought 
us to the point where we are at present. Otherwise, 
the simple fact that after so many years of trial the 
world has made no greater progress than it has, must 
impress our minds injuriously; either making us de¬ 
spair of doing what our fathers have not done, or if 
we do not despair, then it may make us unreasonably 
presumptuous, as if we could do more than had been 
done by other generations, because we were wiser 
than they or better. But history forbids despair 
without authorizing vanity: it explains why more 
has not been done by our forefathers: it shews the 
difficulties which beset them, rendering success im¬ 
possible ; while it records the greatness of their ef¬ 
forts which we cannot hope to surpass. But without 
surpassing, perhaps without equalling, their efforts, we 


32 


INAUGURAL LECTURE. 


may learn by their experience to avoid their diffi¬ 
culties : Napoleon crossed the Alps with scarcely the 
loss of a man, while Hannibal left behind him nearly 
half his army; yet Napoleon was not a greater man 
than Hannibal, nor was his enterprise conducted 
with greater ability. Two things we ought to learn 
from history; one, that we are not in ourselves 
superior to our fathers; another, that w r e are shame¬ 
fully and monstrously inferior to them, if we do not 
advance beyond them. 

And now if the view here taken of the greatness, 
first of all history, and then especially of modern 
history, be correct, it will at once shew in what way 
the Professorship which I have the honour to hold, 
may be made productive of some benefit to the Uni¬ 
versity. It is certainly no affected humility, but the 
very simple truth, to acknowledge, that of many large 
and fruitful districts in the vast territory of modern 
history I possess only the most superficial knowledge, 
of some I am all but totally ignorant. I could but 


ill pretend to guide others where I should be at a 
loss myself: and though many might possess a know¬ 
ledge far surpassing mine, yet the mere ordinary 
length of human life renders it impossible for any 
one to have that profound acquaintance with every 
part of modern history in detail, which might enable 
him to impart a full understanding of it to others. 
But yet it may be possible, and this indeed is my 
hope, to encourage others to study it, to point out 
how much is to be done, and to suggest some rules 
for doing it. And if, in addition to this, I could 


INAUGURAL LECTURE. 


38 


myself exemplify these rules in working 1 at some one 
particular portion of history, I should have accom¬ 
plished all that I can venture to anticipate. Meanwhile 
we have in this place an immense help towards the 
study of modern history, in our familiar acquaintance 
with the history of the ancient world, or at any rate 
with the works of its greatest historians. The im¬ 
portance of this preparation is continually brought 
to my mind by observing the bad effects of the want 
of it in those who have not enjoyed our advantages: 
on the other hand, here, as in other matters, advan¬ 
tages neglected are but our shame, and if we here 
are ignorant of modern history, we are I think espe¬ 
cially inexcusable. 

I have detained you I fear too long, and yet have 
left much unsaid, and have compressed some part of 
what I have said into limits which I am afraid have 
scarcely allowed it to be stated intelligibly. This 
defect however it may be possible to remedy on 
future occasions, when much that has been now put 
summarily may be developed more fully. For other 
defects not equally within my power to remedy, I have 
only in all sincerity to request your indulgence. 
Deeply as I value the privilege of addressing you as 
one of the Professors of this University,—and there 
is no privilege which I more value, no public reward 
or honour which could be to me so welcome,—I feel 
no less keenly the responsibility which it involves, 
and the impossibility of discharging its duties in any 
manner proportioned to its importance, or to my own 
sense of what it requires. 


D 




✓ 



1 































APPENDIX. 


I have alluded in my Inaugural Lecture to authori- 
ties deserving of all respect which maintain the doc¬ 
trine of Warburton, that “the object of political so¬ 
ciety is the preservation of body and goods.” I al¬ 
luded particularly to the Archbishop of Dublin, and 
to the author of a Review of Mr. Gladstone’s book, 
“ The State in its Relations with the Church,” in 
the 139th number of the Edinburgh Review. It is 
due to such opponents not to pass by their arguments 
unnoticed; it is due to them, and still more to my¬ 
self, lest I should be suspected of leaving them un¬ 
answered because I could not answer them. 

It appears to me that the Reviewer is led to 
maintain Warburton’s doctrine, chiefly in consequence 
of certain practical difficulties which seem to result 
from the doctrine opposed to it. He does not wish 
to restrict the state from regarding religious and 
moral ends; but fearing that its regard for them 
will lead to practical mischief, he will only allow it 
to consider them in the second place, so far, that is, 
as they do not interfere with its primary object, the 

d 2 



30 


APPENDIX TO 


protection of persons and property. The Warbur- 
tonian theory appears not to be the natural con¬ 
clusion of enquiries into the object of governments, 
but an ingenious device to enable us to escape from 
some difficulties which we know not how to deal 
with. If the opposite theory can be freed from 
these difficulties, it may be believed that the Re¬ 
viewer would gladly sacrifice the theory of War- 
burton. 

I regard the theory of government, maintained in 
my Lecture, to be a theory which we can in practice 
only partially realize. This I quite allow, at least 
with regard either to the present, or to any future, 
which we can as yet venture to anticipate. It is a 
theory which, nowhere perfectly realized, is realized 
imperfectly in very different degrees in different 
times and countries. It must not be forced upon a 
state of things not ripe for it, and therefore its 
most zealous advocates must often be content to 
tolerate violations of it more or less flagrant. All 
this is true; but yet I believe it to be the true 
theory of government, and that by acknowledging it 
to be so, and keeping it therefore always in sight, 
we may be able at last to approach indefinitely near 
to it. 

The moral character of government seems to 
follow necessarily from its sovereign power; this is 
the simple ground of what I will venture to call the 
moral theory of its objects. For as in each individual 
man there is a higher object than the preservation of 
his body and goods, so if he be subjected in the last 


INAUGURAL LECTURE. 


37 


resort to a power incapable of appreciating this higher 
object, his social or political relations, instead of being 
the perfection of his being, must be its corruption; 
the voice of law can only agree accidentally with 
that of his conscience, and yet on this voice of law 
his life and death are to depend; for its sovereignty 
over him must be, by the nature of the case, abso¬ 
lute. 

The Reviewer’s distinction between primary and 
secondary ends, and his estimate of physical ends as 
primary and moral as secondary, may apply perfectly 
well to any society, except that which is sovereign 
over all human life; because so long as this sovereign 
society preserves the due order of objects, postponing 
the physical to the moral, other societies may safely 
in their subordinate sphere reverse it, the check 
upon them being always at hand; the confession 
theoretically, and the care practically, that the 
physical end shall take precedence of the moral 
only at certain times and in certain instances, but 
that the rule of life is the other way. 

And again, that singleness of object which the 
Reviewer considers so great an excellence, “ every 
contrivance of human wisdom being likely to answer 
its end best when it is constructed with a single view 
to that end,” belongs it is true to subordinate so¬ 
cieties or contrivances, but ceases to exist as we 
ascend from the subordinate to the supreme. This is 
the exact difference between teaching and education; 
a teacher, whether it be of Latin and Greek, or 
of French and German, or of geography and history. 


38 


APPENDIX TO 


or of drawing, or of gymnastics, has nothing to think 
of beyond his own immediate subject; it is not his 
concern if his pupil’s tastes and abilities are more 
adapted to other studies, if that particular knowledge 
which he is communicating is claiming a portion of 
time more than in accordance with its value. He 
has one single object, to teach his own science 
effectually. But he who educates must take a 
higher view, and pursue an end accordingly far more 
complicated. He must adjust the respective claims 
of bodily and mental exercise, of different kinds of 
intellectual labour;—he must consider every part of 
his pupil’s nature, physical, intellectual and moral; 
regarding the cultivation of the last, however, as 
paramount to that of either of the others. Now ac¬ 
cording to the Reviewer’s theory, the state is like 
the subordinate teacher; according to mine it is like 
the educator, and for this very reason, because its 
part cannot be subordinate; if you make the state 
no more than a particular teacher, we must look for 
the educator elsewhere; for the sovereign authority 
over us must be like the educator, it must regulate 
our particular lessons, and determine that we shall 
study most what is of most value. 

But I believe that the moral theory of the objects 
of a state, expressed as I have here expressed it, 
would in itself never have been disputed. It is con¬ 
sidered to be objectionable and leading to great 
practical mischief, when stated somewhat differently; 
when it is said, that the great object of a state is to 
promote and propagate religious truth; a statement 


INAUGURAL LECTURE. 


39 


which yet appears to be identical, or nearly so, with 
the moral theory; so that if it be false, the moral 
theory is thought to be overturned with it. But 
it has always appeared to me that here precisely we 
find the great confusions of the whole question; and 
that the substitution of the term “ religious truth ” 
in the place of 44 man’s highest perfection ” has given 
birth to the great difficulties of the case. For by 
44 religious truth” we immediately understand certain 
dogmatical propositions on matters more or less con¬ 
nected with religion ; these we connect with a certain 
creed and a certain sect or church, and then the 
theory comes to be that the great object of a 
state is to uphold some one particular church, con¬ 
ceived to be the true one, and to discountenance all 
who are not members of it; a form in which I do 
not wonder that the moral theory should be regarded 
as most objectionable. 

All societies of men, whether we call them states 
or churches, should make their bond to consist in a 
common object and a common practice, rather than 
in a common belief; in other words, their end should 
be good rather than truth. We may consent to act 
together, but we cannot consent to believe together; 
many motives may persuade us to the one; we may 
like the object, or we may like our company, or we 
may think it safest to join them, or most convenient, 
and any one of these motives is quite sufficient to 
induce an unity of action, action being a thing in our 
own power. But no motives can persuade us to be¬ 
lieve together; we may wish a statement to be true, 


40 


APPENDIX TO 


we may admire those who believe it, we may find it 
very inconvenient not to believe it; all this helps us 
nothing; unless our own mind is freely convinced 
that the statement or doctrine be true, we cannot by 
possibility believe it. That union in action will in 
the end lead very often to union of belief is most 
true; but we cannot ensure its doing so; and the 
social bond cannot directly require for its perfectness 
more than union of action. It cannot properly re¬ 
quire more than it is in the power of men to give; 
and men can submit their actions to a common law 
at their own choice, but their internal convictions 
they cannot. 

Such an union of action appears historically to 
have been the original bond of the Christian church. 
Whoever was willing to receive Christ as his master, 
to join His people, and to walk according to their 
rules, he was admitted to the Christian society. We 
know that in the earliest church there existed the 
strangest varieties of belief, some Christians not even 
believing that there would be a resurrection of the 
dead. Of course it was not intended that such va¬ 
rieties should be perpetual; a closer union of belief 
was gradually effected: but the point to observe is 
that the union of belief grew out of the union of 
action: it was the result of belonging to the society 
rather than a previous condition required for belong¬ 
ing to it. And it is true farther, that all union of 
action implies in one sense an union of belief; that 
is, they who agree to do a certain thing must believe 
that in some way or other, either as a positive good 


INAUGURAL LECTURE. 


41 


or as the lesser evil, it is desirable for them to do it. 
But belief in the desirableness of an act differs 
greatly from belief in the truth of a proposition; 
even fear may give unity of action, and such unity 
of belief as is implied by it: a soldier is threatened 
with death if he does not fight, and so believing that 
to fight is now desirable for him, as a less evil than 
certain death, he stands his ground and fights accord¬ 
ingly. But fear, though it may make us wish with 
all our hearts that we could believe the truth of a 
proposition, yet cannot enable or compel us to be¬ 
lieve it. 

Now the state aiming at the highest perfection of 
its members, can require them to conform their con¬ 
duct to a certain law; and it may exclude from its 
benefits those who dispute this law’s authority. Nor 
does it in the least matter whether the law so en¬ 
forced be of the state’s own invention, or be borrowed 
* 

from some other nation, as many countries have 
adopted the Roman law; or be received not from 
any human author at all, but from God. A state 
may as justly declare the New Testament to be its 
law, as it may choose the institutes and code of Jus¬ 
tinian. In this manner the law of Christ’s church 
may be made its law; and all the institutions which 
this law enjoins, whether in ritual or discipline, may 
be adopted as national institutions just as legiti¬ 
mately as any institutions of mere human origin. 

The question then which is sometimes asked so in¬ 
dignantly,—Is the government to impose its religion 
upon the people ? may be answered by asking again, 


42 


APPENDIX TO 


Is the government to impose its own laws upon the 
people? We speak of the government as distinct 
from the people, without thereby implying that it is 
in opposition to the people. In a corrupt state the 
government and people are wholly at variance; in a 
perfect state they would be wholly one; in ordinary 
states they are one more or less imperfectly. We 
need not be afraid to say, that in a perfect state the 
law of the government would be the law of the 
people, the law of their choice, the expression of 
their mind. In less perfect states the law of the 
government is more or less the law of the people, 
suiting them in the main if not entirely. If it be 
wholly or in great part unwelcome to them, some¬ 
thing in that state is greatly wrong; and although 
I believe that there are cases where a dictatorship is 
a good, and where good laws may rightfully be im¬ 
posed on a barbarian and unwilling people; yet, as 
the rule, there can be no doubt that such a state of 
things is tyranny. When I speak therefore of the 
government, I am speaking of it as expressing the 
mind and will of the nation; and though a govern¬ 
ment may not impose its own law, whether human or 
divine, upon an adverse people; yet a nation, acting 
through its government, may certainly choose for 
itself such a law as it deems most for its good. 

And therefore when it has been said that “ these 
islands do not belong to the king and parliament in 
the same manner as the house or land of any in¬ 
dividual belongs to the owner,” and that therefore a 
government may not settle the religious law of a 


INAUGURAL LECTURE. 


43 


country as the master of a family may settle the re¬ 
ligious practices of his household ; this is true only if 
we consider the king and parliament as not speaking 
the voice of the nation, but their own opposed to 
that of the nation. For the right of a nation over 
its own territory must be at least as absolute as that 
of any individual over his own house and land; and 
it surely is not an absurdity to suppose that the voice 
of government can ever be the voice of the nation: 
although they unhappily too often differ, yet surely 
they may conceivably, and very often do in practice, 
completely agree. 

The only question then is, how far the nation or 
society may impose its law upon a number of dis¬ 
sentient individuals; what we have to do with, are 
the rights of the body in relation to those of the 
several members; a grave question certainly,—I 
know of none more difficult; but which exists in all 
its force, even if we abandon the moral theory of the 
state altogether. For if we acknowledge the idea 
of a church, the difficulty meets us no less; the 
names of state and church make no difference in the 
matter; we have still a body imposing its laws upon 
individuals; if the state may not interfere with an 
individual’s religion, how can the church do it ? for 
the difficulty is that the individual cannot and must 
not be wholly merged in the society; he cannot 
yield all his convictions of truth and right to the 
convictions of other men : he may sometimes be 
called upon to dissent from, and to disobey, chief 
priests and doctors, bishops and presbyters, no less 


44 


APPENDIX TO 


than the secular authorities, as they are called, of 
emperors and kings, proconsuls and parliaments. 
Long before Constantine interfered with his imperial 
power in the concerns of the church, the question 
existed : conscience might be lorded over, tastes and 
feelings rudely shocked, belief claimed for that which 
to the mind of the individual appeared certain error; 
the majority might tyrannize over the minority; the 
society might interfere with the most sacred rights 
of the individual. 

Nor is it the state alone which, by imposing 
articles of faith, is guilty of tempting men to hypo¬ 
crisy ; a charge which has been very strongly urged 
against the system of making full citizenship depend 
on the profession of Christianity: nor is it the state 
alone which does more than merely instruct and per¬ 
suade, and which employs “ secular coercion” in the 
cause of the Gospel; all which things have been said 
to be “ at variance with the true spirit of the 
Gospel,” and to “ imply a sinful distrust, want of 
faith in Christ’s wisdom and goodness and pow r er.” 
The church has required obedience and punished dis¬ 
obedience; I will not appeal to St. Paul’s expression 
of “ delivering a man to Satan for the destruction of 
the flesh, that his spirit might be saved in the day of 
the Lord,” because what is there meant is uncertain, 
and the power claimed may be extraordinary; but I 
maintain that the sentence of excommunication, 
which has been held always to belong to the church, 
is to all intents and purposes a secular coercion; it 
goes much beyond instruction and persuasion, it is a 


INAUGURAL LECTURE. 


45 


punishment as completely as ever was the ancient 
an fit a, or deprivation of political rights: it inflicts 
and is meant to inflict great inconvenience and great 
suffering, acting most keenly upon the noblest minds, 
but yet touching the meanest as effectually, to say 
the least, as the ancient civil penalty of banishment. 

Now accidentally excommunication may be a small 
penalty, but in its own nature it is most grievous. 
It cuts a man off from the kindness and society of 
his nearest and dearest friends; it divides him from 
those with whom alone he can in the nature of things 
feel strong sympathy; for where can a Christian find 
such but among Christ’s people, and from these ex- 
communication cuts him off. And conceive the case 
of a country, geographically remote from other 
countries, and inhabited only by Christians; what 
resource would, under such circumstances, be left to 
an excommunicated person ? and would not the 
temptation be extreme to him to profess his belief 
in whatever the church taught, to yield obedience to 
whatever it required, in order to be saved from a life 
of loneliness and of infamy? Yet the power of ex¬ 
communicating for heretical opinions is one which 
the church is supposed to hold lawfully, whilst the 
power of disfranchising for such opinions is called 
persecution, and a making Christ’s kingdom a king¬ 
dom of the world. 

It is of some consequence to disentangle this con¬ 
fusion, because what I have called the moral theory 
of a state, is really open to no objections but such as 
apply with equal force to the theory of a church, and 


40 


APPENDIX TO 


especially to the theory of a national, and still more 
of an universal church. Wherever there is central¬ 
ization, there is danger of the parts of the body being 
too much crippled in their individual action; and 
yet centralization is essential to their healthy activity 
no less than to the perfection of the body. But if 
men run away with the mistaken notion that liberty 
of conscience is threatened only by a state religion, 
and not at all by a church religion, the danger is that 
they will abandon religion altogether to what they 
call the church, that is, to the power of a society far 
worse governed than most states, and likely to lay 
far heavier burdens on individual conscience, because 
the spirit dominant in it is narrower and more in¬ 
tolerant. 

No doubt all societies, whether they are called 
states or churches, are bound to avoid tempting the 
consciences of individuals by overstraining the terms 
of citizenship or communion. And it is desirable, 
as I said before, to require a profession of obedience 
rather than of belief, because obedience can and will 
often be readily rendered where belief would be 
withheld. But as states require declarations of alle¬ 
giance to the sovereign, so they may require de¬ 
clarations of submission to the authority of a par¬ 
ticular law. If a man believes himself bound to refuse 
obedience to the law of Christianity, or will not pledge 
himself to regard it as paramount in authority to 
any human legislation, he cannot properly be a 
member of a society which conceives itself bound to 
regulate all its proceedings by this law, and cannot 


INAUGURAL LECTURE. 


47 


allow any of its provisions to be regarded as revo¬ 
cable or alterable. But no human power can pre¬ 
sume to enquire into the degree of a man’s positive 
belief: the heretic was not properly he who did not 
believe what the church taught, but he who wilfully 
withdrew himself from its society, refusing to con¬ 
form to its system, and setting up another system of 
his own. 

I know that it will be objected to this, that it is 
no other than the system of the old philosophers, 
who upheld paganism as expedient, while they 
laughed at it in their hearts as false. But he who 
makes such an objection must surely forget the es¬ 
sential difference between paganism and Christianity. 
Paganism, in the days of the philosophers, scarcely 
pretended to rest on a foundation of historical truth; 
no thinking man believed in it, except as allegori¬ 
cally true. But Christianity commends itself to the 
minds of a vast majority of thinking men, as being 
true in fact no less than in doctrine; they believe in 
it as literally true no less than spiritually. When 
I speak then of a state requiring obedience to the 
Christian law, it means that the state, being the per¬ 
fect church, should do the church’s work; that is, 
that it should provide for the Christian education of 
the young, and the Christian instruction of the old; 
that it should, by public worship and by a Christian 
discipline, endeavour, as much as may be, to realize 
Christianity to all its people. Under such a system, 
the teachers would speak because they believed, for 
Christian teachers as a general rule do so, and their 


48 


APPENDIX TO 


hearers would, in like manner, learn to believe also. 
Farther, the evidence of the Christian religion, in 
itself so unanswerable, would be confirmed by the 
manifest witness of the Christian church, when pos¬ 
sessing a real living constitution, and purified by an 
efficient discipline; so that the temptations to un¬ 
belief would be continually lessened, and unbelief, in 
all human probability, would become continually of 
more rare occurrence. And possibly the time might 
come when a rejection of Christianity would be so 
clearly a moral offence, that profane writings would 
be as great a shock to all men’s notions of right and 
wrong as obscene writings are now, and the one 
might be punished with no greater injury to liberty 
of conscience than the other. 

But this general hearty belief in Christianity is to 
be regarded by the Christian society, whether it be 
called church or state, not as its starting point, but 
as its highest perfection. To begin with a strict 
creed and no efficient Christian institutions, is the 
sure way to hypocrisy and unbelief; to begin with 
the most general confession of faith, imposed, that is, 
as a test of membership, but with vigorous Christian 
institutions, is the way most likely to lead, not only 
to a real and general belief, but also to a lively per¬ 
ception of the highest points of Christian faith. In 
other words, intellectual objections to Christianity 
should be tolerated, where they are combined with 
moral obedience; tolerated, because in this way they 
are most surely removed; whereas a corrupt or dis¬ 
organized church with a minute creed, encourages 


INAUGURAL LECTURE. 


41 ) 


intellectual objections; and if it proceeds to put 
them down by force, it does often violate the right 
of conscience, punishing an unbelief which its own 
evil has provoked, and, so far as human judgment 
can see, has in great measure justified. 

I have endeavoured to shew that the favourite ob¬ 
jections against the state’s concerning itself with 
religion, apply no less to the theory of a church, the 
difficulty being to prevent the society from con¬ 
trolling the individual mind too completely, and 
from encouraging unbelief and hypocrisy by requir¬ 
ing prematurely a declaration of belief from its 
members, rather than a promise of obedience. It 
is hardly necessary to observe, that the moral theory of 
a state is not open to the objection commonly brought 
against our actual constitution, namely, that parlia¬ 
ment is not a fit body to legislate on matters of reli¬ 
gion ; for the council of a really Christian state 
would consist of Christians at once good and sensible, 
quite as much as the council of a really Christian 
church ; and if we take a nominally Christian state 
or a nominally Christian church, their councils will 
be equally unfit to legislate; to say nothing of the 
obvious answer, that the details of all great legisla¬ 
tive measures, whether ecclesiastical or legal or 
military, may be safely left to professional knowledge 
and experience, so long as there remains a higher 
power, not professional, to give to them the sanction 
of law. 

Finally, the moral theory of a state, which 1 
believe to be the foundation of political truth, 

E 


50 


APPENDIX TO 


agrees and matches, so to speak, with the only true 
theory of a church. If the state under any form, 
and in its highest state of perfection, can only 
primarily take cognizance of physical ends; then its 
rulers can certainly never be the rulers of the church, 
and the church must be governed by rulers of its 
own. Now the notion of a priesthood, or of a 
divinely appointed succession of church governors, 
does not indeed necessarily follow from this ; but at 
any rate it agrees marvellously with it: while, on 
the other hand, if there be in the church no priest¬ 
hood, and no divinely ordered succession of governors, 
then it is ready to become identified with the Chris¬ 
tian state, and to adopt its forms of government; 
and if the Christian state be a contradiction in terms, 
because the state must always prefer physical objects 
to moral, then the church has no resource but to 
imitate its forms as well as it can, although in a 
subordinate society they must lose their own proper 
efficacy. 

Now believing with the Archbishop of Dublin, 
that there is in the Christian church neither priest¬ 
hood nor divine succession of governors, and 
believing with Mr. Gladstone that the state’s highest 
objects are moral and not physical, I cannot but 

wonder that these two truths are in each of their 

systems divorced from their proper mates. The 

church freed from the notions of priesthood and 

apostolical succession, is divested of all unchristian 
and tyrannical power; but craves by reason of its 
subordinate condition the power of sovereign govern- 


INAUC4URAL lecture. 


51 


ment, tliat power which the forms of a free state 
can alone supply healthfully. And the state having 
sovereign power, and also, as Mr. Gladstone allows, 
having a moral end paramount to all others, is at 
once fit to do the work of the church perfectly, so 
soon as it becomes Christian; nor can it abandon its 
responsibility, and surrender its conscience up into 
the hands of a priesthood, who have no knowledge 
superior to its own, and who cannot exercise its 
sovereignty. The Christian king, or council, or 
assembly, excludes the interference of the priest¬ 
hood ; the church without a priesthood, craves its 
Christian assembly, or council, or king. 

Believing that the church has no divinely-ap¬ 
pointed succession of governors or form of govern¬ 
ment, and that its actual governments, considering it 
as distinct from the state, have been greatly inferior 
to the governments of well-ordered kingdoms and 
commonwealths; believing that the end and object 
of a Christian kingdom or commonwealth is precisely 
the same with that of a Christian church, and that 
the separation of the two has led to the grievous 
corruption of both, making the state worldly and 
profane, and the church formal, superstitious, and 
idolatrous; believing farther, that the state cannot 
be perfect till it possess the wisdom of the church, 
nor the church be perfect till it possess the power of 
the state ; that the one has as it were the soul, and 
the other the organized body, each of which requires 
to be united with the other; I would unite one half 
of the Archbishop of Dublin’s theory with one half 


52 


APPENDIX TO 


of Mr. Gladstone’s; agreeing cordially with Mr. 

Gladstone in the moral theory of the state, and 

•/ 

agreeing as cordially with the Archbishop in what I 
will venture to call the Christian theory of the 
church, and deducing from the two the conclusion 
that the perfect state and the perfect church are 
identical. 

In what has been said above, I have rather at¬ 
tempted to answer objections and to remove mis¬ 
conceptions with regard to the moral theory of a 
state, than to offer any positive proof of that theory. 
It seems to me to be one of those truths which in 
itself command general assent, and that the oppo¬ 
sition to it is mostly an after-thought, originating 
solely in a sense of the difficulties which it is sup¬ 
posed practically to involve. And therefore to 
remove those difficulties, leaves the theory with its 
own internal persuasiveness unimpaired, and likely 
as such to be generally received. Something, how¬ 
ever, in support of the theory itself has been offered 
in the Inaugural Lecture; and it may farther be 
proper to notice here a little more in detail two 
elaborate attacks upon it, which have been made in 
the Archbishop of Dublin’s “ Additional Remarks 
on the Jews’ Relief Bill,” published in the volume 
entitled, “ Charges and other Tracts,” printed in 
1836 : and in his work on the “ Kingdom of Christ,” 
printed in 1841. 

In these works it is asserted and implied con¬ 
tinually, that religion is not within the province of 
the civil magistrate; and that secular or legal 


INAUGURAL LECTURE. 


coercion may not be employed in the cause of the 
Gospel. Now the first of these statements is surely 
not a thing to be taken for granted ; and whether it 
be right or wrong, it is certain that such a doctrine 
is condemned by the almost unanimous consent of 
all writers on government, whether heathen or 
Christian, down to th6 eighteenth century; and in 
later times, to name no others, by Burke a and 
Coleridge. Grotius, no mean authority surely on 
points of law and government, has an express work, 
“ De imperio summarum Potestatum circa sacra; ” 
in which he uses nearly the same argument that I 
have adopted in my Inaugural Lecture: namely, 
that the sovereignty of the state makes it necessarily 
embrace all points of human life and conduct. 
And he says, “ Si quis dixerit actiones esse diversas, 
alias puta judiciales, alias militares, alias eccle- 
siasticas, ac proinde hujus diversitatis respectu posse 
ipsum summum imperium in plures dividi, sequitur 


a c< An alliance between church and state in a Christian com¬ 
monwealth, is, in my opinion, an idle and a fanciful speculation. 
An alliance is between two things that are in their nature distinct 
and independent, such as between two sovereign states. But in a 
Christian commonwealth, the church and the state are one and 
the same thing, being different integral parts of the same whole. 
* * * * Religion is so far, in my opinion, from being out of the pro¬ 
vince or duty of a Christian magistrate, that it is, and it ought to 
be, not only his care, but the principal thing in his care; because 
it is one of the great bonds of human society, and its object the 
supreme good, the ultimate end and object of man himself.” Speech 
on the Unitarian Petition, 1792. Burke’s Works, Vol. X. p. 43 . 
Ed. 1818. 


54 


APPENDIX TO 


ex ejus sententia, ut eodem tempore idem homo ah 
hoc ire jussus ad forum, ah illo ad castra, ah illo 
rursus in templum, his omnibus parere teneatur, quod 
est impossible.” Grotius, Opera Theol. tom. iv. (iii.) 
p. 204. ed. Londin. 1679. Nay, it is allowed by 
those who object to the moral theory of a state, 
that Christian legislators did well in forcibly sup¬ 
pressing gladiatorial shows and impure rites, “ as 
being immoral and pernicious actions;” but if the 
legislator has any thing to do with morality, the 
whole question is conceded ; for morality is surely 
not another name for expediency, or what is advan¬ 
tageous for body and goods; yet if it be not, and a 
legislator may prohibit any practice because it is 
wicked, then he regards moral ends, and his care is 
directed towards man’s highest happiness, and to the 
putting down his greatest misery, moral evil. Nor 
in fact does it appear how, on other than purely 
moral considerations, a state is justified in making 
certain abominations penal; such acts involving in 
them no violence or fraud upon persons or property, 
which, according to Warburton, are the only objects 
of a state’s care. 

The words “ secular ” and “ temporal ” appear to 
me to be used by the adversaries of the moral theory 
of a state with some confusion. Every thing done 
on earth is secular and temporal; and in this sense 
no society, whether it be called church or state, can 
have for its direct objects any other than such as are 
secular and temporal. The object of the church is 
not to raise men to heaven, but to make them lit 


INAUGURAL LECTURE. 55 

for heaven; but this is a work done in time and in 
the world, and completed there; nor does it differ 
from what it would be if there were no future life at 
all; our duties to God and man would be just the 
same whether we were to exist for seventy years or 
for ever, although our hope and encouragement 
would be infinitely different. The words “tem¬ 
poral ” and “ secular ” have therefore no place in this 
question, unless we believe that the God of this 
world is really and truly not the God of the next; 
and that “ temporal ” things therefore are subject 
to a different government from things eternal. 
And so with the term “ secular coercion: ” it is 
manifest that no coercion can be applied to any 
man in this life without affecting his present well¬ 
being or enjoyment: excommunication is a “ secular 
coercion” as much as imprisonment; it inflicts a 
present harm, it makes a man’s life less happy than 
it would be otherwise. It is, in fact, one of the se¬ 
verest of earthly punishments; for it is very well to 
talk of it as the natural act of a society against those 
who will not comply with its rules, and that it in¬ 
volves no injury, because a man has only to leave a 
society if he does not like it. But that society may 
be one to which it is the pride and pleasure of his 
life to belong; and if the majority form rules which 
he finds very irksome, and then expel him for not 
complying with them, he sustains, I will not say an 
injury, but a hurt and loss; he is put out of a so¬ 
ciety which he earnestly wished to belong to, and 
which comprehends, it may be, every respectable 


56 


APrENDIX TO 


person in his neighbourhood. He has a strong 
temptation to comply even against his conscience, 
rather than incur such a penalty; and when the so¬ 
ciety is the church of God, to live out of which 
would be to many minds intolerable, is it true that 
exclusion from that society is no temporal punishment 
or coercion ? 

But the argument against which I am contending 
relies mainly on our Lord’s declaration to Pilate that 
“ His kingdom was not of this world;” from which 
it is concluded that Christians can never be justified 
in making the profession of obedience to Christ a 
condition of citizenship, for that is to make Christ’s 
kingdom a kingdom of the world. I have been in 
the habit of understanding our Lord to mean that 
His spiritual dominion did not of itself confer any 
earthly authority; that, therefore, His servants did 
not fight for him against the Roman soldiers, as 
the servants of an earthly king would be bound to 
defend their master against the servants of a foreign 
power. And so neither does the spiritual superiority 
of Christians either exempt them from obedience to 
the law of ordinary government, or authorize them 
to impose their own law on other men by virtue of 
that superiority. In other words, their religion 
gives them no political rights whatever which they 
would not have had without it. 

But this meaning is not considered sufficient. 
Our Lord meant to disclaim political power for His 
people, not only in their actual circumstances, but in 
all other conceivable circumstances: not only as 


INAUGURAL LECTURE. 


57 


claimed by virtue of their religious superiority, but 
as claimed according to the simplest and most ac¬ 
knowledged principles of political right. If in days 
to come, emperor, senate, and people, shall have 
become Christians by the mere force of the truth 
and holiness of Christianity, yet they must not think 
that they may exercise their executive and legis¬ 
lative powers to the hurt of any law or institution 
now existing in the Roman heathen world. Never 
may they dare to interfere with the Roman’s pecu¬ 
liar pride, the absolute dominion of the father over 
his sons; nor with the state of slavery; nor with 
the solemn gladiatorial sacrifice, so grateful to the 
shades of the departed ; nor with those festive rites 
of Flora, in which the people expressed their ho¬ 
mage to the vivifying and prolific powers of nature. 
To stop one of these will be to make Christ’s king¬ 
dom a kingdom of the world, which Christ has 
forbidden. True it is that to us these institutions 
appear immoral or unjust, because Christianity has 
taught us so to regard them; but to a Roman they 
were privileges, or powers, or pleasures, which he 
could ill bear to abandon. And most strange is the 
statement that “ every tribe having been accustomed 
to establish, wherever they were able, a monopoly of 
political rights for themselves, keeping all other in¬ 
habitants of the same territory in a state of tributary 
subjection, this was probably the very thing appre¬ 
hended by those who persecuted the early Christians 
as disaffected persons.” In the first place, the no¬ 
tion of “ one tribe establishing a monopoly of poli- 


58 


APPENDIX TO 


tical rights,” belonged to a state of tilings which had 
long since perished, and was the last thing which 
any man would apprehend in the Roman world in 
the days of Tiberius, when all distinctions of condi¬ 
tion between the various races subject to the empire 
had either been done away long since by Alexander’s 
conquests, or were daily being destroyed by the gift 
of the Roman franchise more and more widely. 
What the Romans dreaded was simply a revolt of 
Judaea; they heard that there was a king of the 
Jews, and they naturally thought that he would at¬ 
tempt to recover the ancient kingdom of his nation; 
and to this it was a clear and satisfactory answer, 
that the kingdom spoken of was not an earthly king¬ 
dom, that no one claimed as David’s heir to expel 
Caesar as a foreign usurper. That the heathen 
Romans persecuted the Christians from a fear of 
losing their civil rights should Christians become the 
predominant party in the empire,.is not only a state¬ 
ment without evidence, but against it. We know 
from the Christian apologists what were the grounds 
of the persecution; we know it farther from the 
well known letters of Pliny and Trajan. The 
Christians were punished for their resolute non-con¬ 
formity to the laws and customs of Rome, and as 
men who, by their principles and lives, seemed to 
condemn the common principles and practice of 
mankind. They were punished not as men who 
might change the laws of Rome hereafter, but as 
men who disobeyed them now. 

I am content with that interpretation of our Lord’s 


INAUGURAL LECTURE. 


50 


words which I believe has been generally given to 
them; that He did not mean to call Himself king 
of the Jews in the common sense of the term, so as 
to imply any opposition to the government of the 
Romans. And as a general deduction from His 
• words, I accept a very important truth which fanati¬ 
cism has often neglected—that moral and spiritual 
superiority does not interfere with the ordinary laws, 
of political right; that the children of God are not 
by virtue of that relation to claim any dominion upon 
earth. Being perfectly convinced that our Lord has 
not forbidden His people to establish His kingdom, 
when they can do so without the breach of any rule 
of common justice, I should hail as the perfect con¬ 
summation of earthly things, the fulfilment of the 
word, that the kingdoms of the world should become 
. the kingdoms of God and of Christ. And that king¬ 
doms of the world not only may, but are bound to 
provide for the highest welfare of their people ac¬ 
cording to their knowledge, is a truth in which phi¬ 
losophers and statesmen, all theory and all practice, 
have agreed with wonderful unanimity down to the 
time of the eighteenth century. In the eighteenth 
century, however, and since, the old truth has not 
wanted illustrious advocates. I have already named 
Burke and Coleridge in our own country, nor am I 
aware that the opposite notion has ever received any 
countenance from any one of the great men of Ger¬ 
many. Up to this moment the weight of authority 
is beyond all comparison against it; and it is for its 
advocates to establish it, if they can, by some clear 


GO 


APrENDIX TO INAUGURAL LECTURE. 


proofs. At present there is no valid objection raised 
against the moral theory of a state’s objects; diffi¬ 
culties only are suggested as to points of practical 
detail, some of them arising from the mixture of ex¬ 
traneous and indefensible doctrines with the simple 
theory itself, and others applicable indeed to that 
theory, but no less applicable to any theory which 
can be given of a Christian church, and to be avoided 
only by a system of complete individual inde¬ 
pendence, in matters relating to morals and to reli¬ 
gion. 


LECTURE I. 


It will not, I trust, be deemed impertinent or af- 
fected, if at the very outset of these Lectures I 
venture again to request the indulgence of my 
hearers for the many deficiencies which will un¬ 
doubtedly be found in them. I could not enter on 
the duties of my office with tolerable cheerfulness, if 
I might not confess how imperfectly I can hope to 
fulfil them. And this is the more necessary, because 
I hope that our standard of excellence in history 
will be continually rising; we shall be convinced, I 
trust, more and more, of the vast amount of know¬ 
ledge which the historical student should aim at, and 
of the rare union of high qualifications required in a 
perfect historian. Now just in proportion to your 
sense of this, must be unavoidably your sense of the 
defects of these Lectures; because I must often 
dwell on the value of a knowledge which I do not 
possess; and must thus lay open my own ignorance 
by the very course which I believe to be most bene¬ 
ficial to my hearers. 


62 


LECTURE I. 


1 


I would gladly consent, however, even to call 
your attention to my want of knowledge, because it 
is, I think, of such great importance to all of us to 
have a lively consciousness of the exact limits of our 
knowledge and our ignorance. A keen sense of either 
implies, indeed, an equally keen sense of the other. A 
bad geographer looks upon the map of a known and of 
an unknown country with pretty nearly the same eyes. 
The random line which expresses the form of a coast 
not yet explored; the streams suddenly stopping in 
their course, or as suddenly beginning to be de¬ 
lineated, because their outlet or their sources are un¬ 
known ; these convey to the eye of an untaught per¬ 
son no sense of deficiency, because the most com¬ 
plete survey of the most thoroughly explored 
country gives him no sense of full information. 
But he who knows how to value a good map, is 
painfully aware of the defects of a bad one ; and he 
who feels these defects, would also value the oppo¬ 
site excellencies. And thus in all things, as our 
knowledge and ignorance are curiously intermixed 
with one another, so it is most important to keep 
the limits of each distinctly traced, that we may be 
able confidently to make use of the one, while we 
endeavour to remove or lessen the other. 

One other remark of a different nature I would 
wish to make also, before I enter upon my lectures. 
Considering that the great questions on which men 
most widely differ from each other, belong almost all 
to modern history, it seems scarcely possible to avoid 
expressing opinions which some of my hearers will 


LECTURE I. 


63 


think erroneous. Even if not expressed they would 
probably be indicated, and I do not know liow this 
is to be avoided. Yet I shall be greatly disap¬ 
pointed if at the close of these lectures, our feeling 
of agreement with one another is not much stronger 
than our feeling of difference. You will not judge 
me so hardly as to suppose that I am expressing a 
hope of proselytizing any one: my meaning is very 
different. But I suppose that all calm enquiry con¬ 
ducted amongst those who have their main principles 
of judgment in common, leads, if not to an approxi¬ 
mation of views, yet at least to an increase of sym¬ 
pathy. And the truths of historical science, which I 
certainly believe to be very real and very important, 
are not exactly the same thing with the opinions of 
any actual party. 

I will now detain you no longer with any pre¬ 
fatory observations, but will proceed directly to our 
subject. I will suppose then, if you please, the case 
of a member of this university who has just taken 
his degree, and finding himself at leisure to enter 
now more fully into other than classical or mathe¬ 
matical studies, proposes to apply himself to modern 
history. We will suppose, moreover, that his actual 
knowledge of the subject goes no farther than what 
he has collected from any of the common popular 
compendiums. And now our question is, in what 
manner he should be recommended to proceed. 

We must allow that the case is one of con¬ 
siderable perplexity. Hitherto in ancient profane 
history, his attention has been confined almost ex- 


G4 


LECTURE I. 


clusively to two countries: and to a few great 
writers whose superior claims to attention are indis¬ 
putable. Nay, if lie goes farther, and endeavours to 
illustrate the regular historians from the other and 
miscellaneous literature of the period, yet his work 
in most cases is to be accomplished without any im¬ 
possible exertion; for many periods indeed of ancient 
history, and these not the least interesting, all our 
existing materials are so scanty that it takes but 
little time to acquaint ourselves with them all, and 
their information is not of a bulk to oppress any but 
the very feeblest memory. 

How overwhelming is the contrast when the 
student turns to modern history ! Instead of two 
countries claiming his attention, he finds several 
systems of countries, if I may so speak, any one of 
which offers a wide field of enquiry. First of all, 
there is the history of Europe; then quite distinct 
from this there is oriental history; and thirdly, there 
is the history of European colonies. But when we 
turn from the subjects of enquiry to the sources of 
information, the difference is greater still. Consider 
the long rows of folio volumes which present them¬ 
selves to our notice in the Bodleian, or in our college 
libraries; and think how many of these relate to 
modern history. There is the Benedictine collection 
of the early French historians, and MuratoiTs great 
collection of the Italian historians of the middle 
ages: and these, vast as they are, relate only to two 
countries, and to particular periods. What shall we 
say of the great collections of works directly subsidiary 


LECTURE I. 


65 


to history, such as Rymer’s Foedera, and the various 
collections of treaties; of bodies of laws, the statutes 
at large for example for England only: of such 
works as the publications of the Record Commission, 
or as the Journals of the Houses of Parliament. 
Turning then to lighter works, which contain some 
of the most precious materials for history, we find 
the countless volumes of the French memoirs, 
magazines, newspapers, (it is enough to remind you 
of the set of the Moniteurs in the Bodleian;) 
correspondence of eminent men printed or in MS., 
(the library at Besanqon contains sixty volumes of 
the Letters of Granvella, Charles the Fifth’s great 
minister,) and lastly, the swarm of miscellaneous 
pamphlets, which in these later days as we know are 
in numbers numberless, but which in the seventeenth 
and even in the sixteenth centuries were more 
numerous than we sometimes are aware of. There is 
a collection of these in Corpus library for example, of 
which I retain a very grateful recollection for many 
hours of amusement which they used to afford me. 
I might go on and extend my catalogue till it far 
exceeded the length of the Homeric catalogue of 
the ships: but I have mentioned quite enough for 
my purpose. We may well conceive that amid this 
boundless wilderness of historical materials, the 
student may be oppressed with a sense of the hope¬ 
lessness of all his efforts; which way shall he choose 
among so many ? what progress can he hope to make 
in a space so boundless ? 

It is quite manifest that a choice must be made 

F 


6G 


LECTURE I. 


immediately. The English student, unless deter¬ 
mined by particular circumstances, will have no dif¬ 
ficulty in seeing that European history should be 
preferred to oriental or to colonial; and again in 
European history itself, that that of our own country, 
or of France, or of Germany, or of Italy, has a 
peculiar claim on his notice. Next, when he has 
fixed upon the country, he has to determine the 
period which he will study, whether he will apply 
himself to any one of the three last centuries, or to 
the middle ages ; and if to these last, whether to their 
earlier period or to their close. And here again, par¬ 
ticular circumstances or the taste of the student will 
of course influence his decision. It matters very little, 
I think, on which his choice may happen to fall. 

We will suppose then the choice to be made of 
some one period, it should not be a very long 
one, whether bounded by merely arbitrary limits, as 
any one particular century, or by such as constitute 
a natural beginning and end, as for example the 
period in German history between the Reformation 
and the peace of Westphalia. If the period fixed 
on be very short, it may be made to include the 
history of two or three countries ; but it would be 
best perhaps to select for our principal subject one 
country only. And now with our work limited 
sufficiently both as to time and as to space, it will 
assume a more compassable shape : and we shall be 
inclined to set about it vigorously. 

In the first place then we should take, I think, 
some one history as nearly contemporary as may be, 


LECTURE I. 


67 


and written, to speak generally, by a native historian. 
For instance, suppose that our subject be France in 
the middle of the fifteenth century, we should begin 
by reading the memoirs of Philip de Comines. 
The reason of this rule is evident; that it is im¬ 
portant to look at an age or country in its own point 
of view ; which of course is best to be obtained from 
a native and contemporary writer. Such a history 
is in fact a double lesson: it gives us the actions and 
the mind of the actors at the same time, telling us 
not only what was done, but with what motives and 
in what spirit it was done. Again the language of a 
native contemporary historian is the language of 
those of whom he is writing; in reading him we are 
in some sort hearing them, and an impression of the 
style and peculiarities of any man’s language is an 
important help towards realizing our notion of him 
altogether. I know not whether others have been 
struck with this equally; but for myself I have 
seemed to gain a far more lively impression of what 
James the First was, ever since I read those 
humorous scenes in the Fortunes of Nigel which 
remind one so forcibly that he spoke a broad Scotch 
dialect. 

If the period which we have chosen be one 
marked by important foreign wars, it will be 
desirable also to read another contemporary history, 
written by a native of the other belligerent power. 
The same war is regarded so differently by the two 
parties engaged in it, that it is of importance to see 
it in more than one point of view, not merely for 

f 2 


68 


LECTURE I. 


the correction of military details, but to make our 
general impressions and our sympathies with either 
side more impartial. And in contemporary histories 
of wars we have the passions and prejudices of both 
parties generally expressed with all their freshness, 
even in cases where both nations, when passion has 
gone to sleep, agree in passing the same judgment. 
Joan of Arc is now a heroine to Englishmen no less 
than to Frenchmen: but in the fifteenth century she 
was looked upon by Englishmen as a witch, while 
the French regarded her as a messenger sent from 
heaven. 

And now the one or two general contemporary 
histories of our period having put us in possession 
not only of the outline and of some of the details 
of events, but also of the prevailing tone of opinion 
and feeling, we next proceed to a process which is 
indeed not a little laborious, and in many places 
would be impracticable, from the difficulty of ob¬ 
taining the books required. But I am convinced 
that it is essential to be gone through once, if we 
wish to learn the true method of historical inves¬ 
tigation : and if done once, for one period, the benefit 
of it will be felt in all our future reading, because 
we shall always know how to explore below the 
surface, whenever we wish to do so, and we shall be 
able to estimate rightly those popular histories 
which after all must be our ordinary sources of in¬ 
formation, except where we find it needful to carry 
on our researches more deeply. And I am address¬ 
ing those who having the benefit of the libraries of 


LECTURE I. 


60 


this place, can really carry into effect, if they will, 
such a course of study as I am going to recommend. 
I cannot indeed too earnestly advise every one who 
is resident in the university to seize this golden time 
for his own reading, whilst he has on the one hand 
the riches of our libraries at his command, and 
before the pressure of actual life has come upon him, 
when the acquisition of knowledge is mostly out of 
the question, and we must be content to live upon 
what we have already gained. Many and many a 
time since I ceased to be resident in Oxford, has the 
sense of your advantages been forced upon my mind ; 
for with the keenest love of historical researches, 
want of books and want of time have continually 
thrown obstacles in my way; and to this hour I look 
back with the greatest gratitude to the libraries and 
the comparative leisure of this place, as having 
enabled me to do far more than I should ever have 
been able to effect elsewhere, and amidst the engage¬ 
ments of a profession. 

I think therefore that here I may venture to re¬ 
commend what I believe to be the best method of 
historical reading; for although even here there will 
be more or less impediments in the way of our carry¬ 
ing it out completely, still the probability is that 
some may have both the will and the power to do 
it; and even an approximation to it, and a regarding 
it as the standard which we should always be 
trying to reach, will, X think, be found to be valu¬ 
able. 

To proceed therefore with our supposed student’s 


70 


LECTURE I. 


course of reading. Keeping the general history 
which he has been reading as his text, and getting 
from it the skeleton, in a manner, of the future 
figure, he must now break forth excursively to the 
right and left, collecting richness and fulness of 
knowledge from the most various sources. For ex¬ 
ample, we will suppose that where his popular 
historian has mentioned that an alliance was con¬ 
cluded between two powers, or a treaty of peace 
agreed upon, he first of all resolves to consult the 
actual documents themselves, as they are to be 
found in some one of the great collections of Euro¬ 
pean treaties, or if they are connected with English 
history, in Rymer’s Foedera. By comparing the 
actual treaty with his historian’s report of its pro¬ 
visions, we get in the first place a critical process of 
some value, inasmuch as the historian’s accuracy is 
at once tested: but there are other purposes 
answered besides. An historian’s report of a treaty 
is almost always an abridgment of it; minor articles 
will probably be omitted, and the rest condensed, 
and stripped of all their formal language. But our 
object now being to reproduce to ourselves, so far as 
is possible, the very life of the period which we are 
studying, minute particulars help us to do this; nay 
the very formal enumeration of titles, and the speci¬ 
fication of towns and districts in their legal style, 
help to realize the time to us, if it be only from 
their very particularity. Every common history re¬ 
cords the substance of the treaty of Troyes, May, 
1420, by which the succession to the crown of 


LECTURE 1. 


71 


France was given to Henry the Fifth. But the treaty 
in itself, or the English version of it which Henry 
sent over to England to be proclaimed there, gives a 
far more lively impression of the triumphant state of 
the great conqueror, and the utter weakness of the 
poor French king, Charles the Sixth, in the ostenta¬ 
tious care taken to provide for the recognition of 
his formal title during his life-time, while all real 
power is ceded to Henry, and provision is made for 
the perpetual union hereafter of the two kingdoms 
under his sole government. 

I have named treaties as the first class of official 
instruments to be consulted, because the mention of 
them occurs unavoidably in every history. Another 
class of documents, certainly of no less importance, • 
yet much less frequently referred to by popular his¬ 
torians, consists of statutes, ordinances, proclam¬ 
ations, acts, or by whatever various names the laws 
of each particular period happen to be designated. 
That the Statute Book has not been more habitually 
referred to by writers on English history, has always 
seemed to me matter of surprise. Legislation has 
not perhaps been so busy in every country as it 
has been with us, yet everywhere and in every 
period it has done something: evils real or sup¬ 
posed have always existed, which the supreme 
power in the nation has endeavoured to remove by 
the provisions of law. And under the name of laws 
I would include the acts of councils, which form an 
important part of the history of European nations 
during many centuries; provincial councils, as you 


72 


LECTURE I. 


are aware, having been held very frequently, and 
their enactments relating to local and particular 
evils, so that they illustrate history in a very lively 
manner. Now in these and all the other laws of any 
given period, we find in the first place from their 
particularity a great additional help towards be¬ 
coming familiar with the times in which they were 
passed; we learn the names of various officers, 
courts, and processes; and these when understood, 
(and I suppose always the habit of reading nothing 
without taking pains to understand it,) help us from 
their very number to realize the state of things then 
existing; a lively notion of any object depending on 
our clearly seeing some of its parts, and the more we 
people it, so to speak, with distinct images, the 
more it comes to resemble the crowded world 
around us. But in addition to this benefit, which I 
am disposed to rate in itself very highly, every thing 
of the nature of law has a peculiar interest and 
value, because it is the expression of the deliberate 
mind of the supreme government of society; and as 
history, as commonly written, records so much of 
the passionate and unreflecting part of human nature, 
we are bound in fairness to acquaint ourselves with 
its calmer and better part also. And then if we 
find, as unhappily we often shall find, that this 
calmer and better part was in itself neither good nor 
wise: that law, which should be the very voice of 
justice, was on the other hand unequal, oppressive, 
insolent; that the deliberate mind of the ruling 
spirits of any age was sunk in ignorance or per- 


LECTURE I. 


73 


verted by wickedness, then we may feel sure that 
with whatever bright spots to be found here and 
there, the general state of that age was evil. 

I am imprudent perhaps in leading you at the 
outset of our historical studies into a region so for¬ 
bidding ; the large volumes of treaties and laws 
with which I have recommended the student to be¬ 
come familiar, may seem enough to crush the 
boldest spirit of enterprise. There is an alchemy, 
however, which can change these apparently dull 
materials into bright gold; but I must not now an¬ 
ticipate the mention of it. I will rather proceed to 
offer some relief to the student by inviting him next 
to turn to volumes of a very different character. 
Some of the great men of an age have in all pro¬ 
bability left some memorials of their minds behind 
them, speeches, it may be, or letters, or a journal; or 
possibly works of a deeper character, in which they 
have handled, expressly and deliberately, some of the 
questions which most interested their generation. 
Now if our former researches have enabled us to 
people our view of the past with many images of 
events, institutions, usages, titles, &c., to make up 
with some completeness what may be called the still 
life of the picture, we shall next be anxious to people 
it also with the images of its great individual men, 
to change it as it were from a landscape or a view 
of buildings, to what may truly be called an histori¬ 
cal picture. Whoever has made himself famous by 
his actions, or even by his rank or position in society, 
so that his name is at once familiar to our ears, 


74 


LECTURE I. 


sucli a man’s writings have an interest for us even 
before we begin to read them; the instant that he 
gets up as it were to address us, we are hushed into 
the deepest attention. These works give us an 
insight not only into the spirit of an age, as exempli¬ 
fied in the minds of its greatest men, but they 
multiply in some sort the number of those with 
whom we are personally and individually in sym¬ 
pathy ; they enable us to recognise amidst the dim¬ 
ness of remote and uncongenial ages, the features of 
friends and of brethren. 

But the greatest, or at least the most active men 
of an age, may have left but little behind them in 
writing; memorials of this kind, however precious, 
will often be but few. We next then consider who 
those were who were eminent by their writings only, 
who before they began to speak had no peculiar 
claim to be heard, but who won and fixed attention 
by the wisdom or eloquence of what they uttered. 
Or again, to take a still lower step, there may have 
been men who spoke only to a limited audience, men 
of eminence merely in their own profession or study, 
but who within their own precinct were listened to, and 
exercised considerable influence. Yet once again, 
there is a still lower division of literature, there are 

• 

works neither of men great by their actions, nor of 
men proved to be great by these very works them¬ 
selves ; nor of men, who though not great properly in 
any sense, were yet within a certain circle respected 
and influential; but works written by common persons 
for common persons, works written because the pro- 


LECTURE I. 


75 


fession or circumstances or necessities of their 
authors led them to write, second and third rate 
works of theology, second and third rate political, or 
legal, or philosophical, or literary disquisitions, 
ordinary histories, poetry of that class which is to a 
proverb worthless, novels and tales which no man 
reads twice, and only an indiscriminate literary 
voracity would read once. Time gives even to this 
mass of rubbish an accidental value; what was in its 
life-time mere moss, becomes in the lapse of ages r 
after being buried in its peat bed, of some value as 
fuel; it is capable of yielding both light and heat. 
And so even the most worthless pieces of the litera¬ 
ture of a remote period, contain in them both in¬ 
struction and amusement. The historical student 
should consult such of these as time has spared; all 
the four divisions of the literature of a period which 
I have mentioned should engage his attention, not 
all certainly in an equal degree, but all are of im¬ 
portance towards that object which at this part of 
his course he is especially pursuing; the realizing to 
himself, I mean, as vividly and as perfectly as 
possible, all the varied aspects of the period which 
he is investigating. 

I feel sure that whilst I have been reading the 
three or four last pages, I have been drawing rather 
largely on your kind readiness to put the best con¬ 
struction on my words which they will possibly bear. 
But after all, you must I fear be unable to acquit me 
of great extravagance, in recommending the student 
to make himself acquainted with the whole litera- 


LECTURE I. 


70 

ture of the period of which he wishes to learn the 
history. I trust, however, to clear myself of this 
imputation, by explaining In what manner so wide a 
range of reading is really practicable. There is no 
greater confusion than exists in many men’s notions of 
deep and superficial reading. It is often supposed, 
I believe, that deep reading consists in going through 
many books from beginning to end, superficial 
reading in looking only at parts of them. But depth 
and shallowness have reference properly to our par¬ 
ticular object: so that the very same amount of 
reading may be superficial in one sense, and deep in 
another. For example, I want to know whether a 
peculiar mode of expression occurs in a given writer; 
an expression, we will say, supposed to have come 
into existence only at a later period. Now with a 
view to this object, any thing short of an almost 
complete perusal of the writer’s works from begin- 
nig to end is superficial: because I cannot be in a 
condition to decide the question on a partial hearing 
of the evidence; and the evidence in this case is not 
any given portion of the author’s writings, but the 
whole of them. Again, if I wish to know what a 
writer lias said on some one particular subject, and 
he has written an express work on this subject, my 
reading is not superficial if I go through that one 
work, although I may leave a hundred of his works 
on other subjects unread altogether. Now for what 
purpose is it that we wish to consult the general 
second-rate literature of a period, as an illustration of 
its history ? Is it not in order to discover what was 




LECTURE I. 


77 


the prevailing tone and taste of men’s minds ; how 
they reasoned; what ideas had most possession of 
them ; what they knew, and what use they made of 
their knowledge? For this object, a judicious selec¬ 
tion following a general survey of the contents of an 
author’s works is really quite sufficient. We take 
the volume or volumes of them into our hands; we 
look at the contents, and so learn the subjects and 
nature of his several writings. It may be and often 
is the case, that amongst them we find some letters; 
on these we should fasten immediately, and read 
through several of them, taking some from different 
periods of his life, if his correspondence run through 
several years. Again, his works may contain 
treatises, we will say, on various subjects; if he be a 
theologian, they may contain commentaries also on 
the whole or parts of the Scripture; or controversial 
tracts, or meditations and prayers. Amongst his 
treatises we should select such as must from their 
subject call forth the character of his mind most 
fully; and one or two of these we should read 
through. So again, we can test his character as a 
commentator by consulting him on such parts of 
Scripture as necessarily lead to the fullest develope- 
ment of his opinions and knowledge; and we can 
deal in a similar way with his other writings. If he 
be an historian, a portion of his work will certainly 
display his historical powers sufficiently; if he be a poet, 
the strength and character of his genius will appear, 
without our reading every line which he has written. 
It is possible certainly that an estimate so formed 


78 


LECTURE I. 


may not be altogether correct; we should not value 
Shakespeare sufficiently without being acquainted 
with all his great plays; yet even in the case of 
Shakespeare, a knowledge of any one of his best 
tragedies, and any one of his best comedies, would 
give us a notion faithful in kind, although requiring 
to be augmented in degree. But what I am saying 
does not apply to the works of the very highest class 
of minds, but to the mass of ordinary literature; 
and surely any one canto of Glover’s Leonidas would 
enable us to judge very fairly of the merits and style 
of the poem; and half a dozen of the letters of 
Junius would express faithfully the excellencies and 
faults of the author as a political writer, without 
our being obliged to read through the whole volume. 

That, however, is really superficial reading, which 
dips merely into a great many places of a volume at 
random, and studies no considerable portion of it con¬ 
secutively. One whole treatise upon a striking subject 
may, and will, give us an accurate estimate of a writer’s 
powers; it will exhibit his way of handling a question, 
his fairness or unfairness, his judgment, his clearness, 
his eloquence, or his powers of reasoning. One single 
treatise out of a great many will shew us this, but 
not mere extracts even from many treatises. Parti¬ 
cular passages selected, whether for good or for bad, 
are really apt to remind one of the brick which the 
old pedant carried about as a specimen of his house. 
It is vain to judge of any writer from isolated quota¬ 
tions, least of all, when we want to judge of him as 
illustrating the views and habits of his time. No- 


LECTURE I. 


79 


tiling can be more unsafe than to venture to criticise 
the literature of a period from turning over the 
pages even of the fullest literary history: Tiraboschi 
is invaluable as a book of reference, furnishing* us 
with the number of Italian writers who flourished at 
any one time, and with a catalogue raisonnee of their 
writings ; but a catalogue is to guide research, not 
to supersede it. Besides, quotations made from 
writers to shew the character of their opinions, are 
not always to be trusted even for their honesty. 
One instance of this is so remarkable, and affords so 
memorable a warning, that I cannot refrain from 
noticing it, as it may possibly be new to some of my 
hearers. Mosheim, in his Ecclesiastical History, 
gave in one of his notes the following passage from 
the works of Eligius or Eloy, bishop of Noyon in 
the middle of the seventh century, as a specimen of 
the false notions of Christian duty entertained gene¬ 
rally at that period, even by men of the highest re¬ 
puted holiness a . Robertson in his notes to his 


* Text of Mosheim. “ The Christians of this century (the 
seventh) seemed by their superstitious doctrine to exclude from 
the kingdom of heaven such as had not contributed by their offer¬ 
ings to augment the riches of the clergy or the church.” Century 
VII. Part ii. Ch. 3. Edit. 8vo. 1806. 

His note is as follows :—“ S. Eligius or Eloi expresses himself 
upon this matter in the following manner: Bonus Christianus est 
qui ad ecclesiam frequenter venit, et oblationem, quae in altari Deo 
offeratur, exhibet: qui de fructibus suis non gustat nisi prius Deo 
aliquid offerat: qui quoties sanctae solennitates adveniunt, ante 
dies plures castitatem etiam cum propria uxore custodit, ut secura 
conscientia Domini altare accedere possit; qui postremo symbolum 


80 


LECTURE T. 


Charles V. borrowed the quotation, to prove, that at 
that period “ men instead of aspiring to sanctity and 

vel orationem Dominicam memoriter tenet . . . Redimite animas 
vestras de poena, dum habetis in potestate remedia . . . oblationes 
et decimas ecclesiis ofFerte, luminaria sanctis locis, juxta quod 
babetis, exbibete ... ad ecclesiam quoque frequentius convenite, 
sanctorum patrocinia bumiliter expetite . . . quod si observaveritis, 
securi in die judicii ante tribunal teterni judicis venientes dicetis: 
Da, Domine, quia dedimus.” Maclaine, tbe English translator, 
then adds this farther note of bis own : “ We see here a large and 
ample description of tbe character of a good Christian , in which 
there is not tbe least mention of tbe love of God , resignation to bis 
will, obedience to bis laws, or of justice , benevolence , and charity , 
towards men, and in which the whole of religion is made to consist 
in coming often to the church , bringing offerings to the altar, lighting 
candles in consecrated places, and such like vain services.” 

I am glad to say that Schrockh, although be quotes tbe passage 
as shewing bow much stress was laid on gifts to tbe church, yet 
quotes it quite fairly, without garbling, and expressly says before 
be begins to quote it, “ Man muss gesteben, dass darunter viel 
wabres und schriftmassiges vorkommt.” Christl. Kirch. Ges- 
chichte. xix. Theil. p. 438. Ed. 1794. Leipzig. Tbe whole 
passage is as follows :— 

“ Qui verus Christianus vult esse, bsec ei necesse est prsecepta 
custodire; si enim non custodit, ipse se circumvenit. Ille itaque 
bonus Christianus est, qui nulla phylacteria vel adinventiones 
diaboli credit, sed oinnem spem suam in solo Christo ponit: qui 
peregrinos tanquam ipsum Christum cum gaudio suscipit, quia ipse 
dicit, Hospes fui et suscepistis me; Et, quando fecistis uni ex 
minimis meis mibi fecistis. Ille inquam bonus Christianus est qui 
hospitibus pedes lavat, et tanquam parentes carissimos diligit, 
qui juxta quod habet pauperibus eleemosynam tribuit, qui ad 
ecclesiam frequenter venit, et oblationem qu£e in altari Deo 
offeratur exbibet, qui de fructibus suis non gustat, nisi prius 
Deo aliquid offerat: qui stateras dolosas et mensuras duplices non 
habet; qui pecuniam suam non dedit ad usuram ; qui ipse caste 



LECTURE I. 


81 


viitue, imagined that they satisfied every obligation 
of duty by a scrupulous observance of external cere- 

vivit et filios vel vicinos docet, lit caste et cum timore Dei vivant ; 
et quoties sanctae solennitates adveniunt ante dies plures castitatem 
etiam cum propria uxore custodit, ut secura conscientia Domini 
altare accedere possit: qui postremo symbolum vel orationem 
dominicam memoriter tenet, et filios ac familiam eandem docet. 
Qui talis est, sine dubio verus Christianus est, sed et Christus in 
ipso habitat, qui dixit, Ego et pater veniemus et mansionem apud 
eum faciemus. Similiter et per prophetam dixit, Ego inhabitabo 
in eis et inter illos ambulabo, et ero illorum Deus. 

“ Ecce audistis fratres quales sint Christiani boni, ideo quantum 
potestis cum Dei adjutorio laborate, ut nomen Christianum non 
sit falsum in vobis, sed ut veri Christiani esse possitis: semper 
praecepta Christi et cogitate in mente, et implete in operatione. 
Redimite animas vestras de poena, dum habetis in potestate remedia: 
eleemosynam juxta vires facite, pacem et charitatem habete, dis¬ 
co rdes ad concordiam revocate, mendacium fugite, perjurium ex- 
pavescite, falsum testimonium non dicite, furtum non facite : obla- 
tiones et decimas ecclesiis olferte, luminaria sanctis locis juxta 
quod habetis, exhibete, symbolum et orationem Dominicam 
memoria retinete et filiis vestris insinuate, filios etiam quos ex 
baptismo suscepistis docete et castigate ut semper cum timore Dei 
vivant: scitote vos fidejussores pro ipsis apud Deum esse. Ad ec- 
clesiam quoque frequenter convenite, sanctorum patrocinia humiliter 
expetite; diem Dominicum pro reverentia resurrectionis Christi abs¬ 
que ullo servili opere colite, sanctorum solemnitates pio affectu cele¬ 
brate, proximos vestros sicut vos ipsos diligite: quod vobis vultis 
ab aliis fieri hoc et vos aliis facite : quod vobis non vultis fieri nulli 
facite : charitatem ante omnia habete, quia charitas operit multi- 
tudinem peccatorum : estote hospitales, humiles, omnem sollici- 
tudinem vestram ponentes in Deum, quoniam ipsi cura est de 
vobis. Infirmos visitate, carceratos requirite, peregrinos suscipite, 
esurientes pascite, nudos vestite. Ariolos et magos spernite: 
sit vobis sequalitas in pondere et mensura : sit statera justa, justus 
modius, sequusque sextarius, nec plusquam dedistis repetatis, 

G 


82 


LECTURE I. 


monies.” - Mr. Hallam, in the first editions of his 
work on the Middle Ages, (in the later editions the 
error has been corrected,) transcribed it into his ac¬ 
count of the state of society, to shew that “ priests 
made submission to the church not only the condi¬ 
tion but the measure of all praise.” Dr. Wadding- 
ton in the text of his History of the Church, had 
referred to the self-same passage, which he gave 
accordingly, still copied from Mosheim, in a note at 
the foot of his page. But being led to enquire a 
little more fully into the matter, he found the whole 
passage in D’Acheri’s Spicilegium Yeterum Scripto- 
rum, (D’Acheri was one of the learned French Be¬ 
nedictines of the seventeenth century,) and there he 
discovered that the quotation in Mosheim, which 
Robertson and Mr. Hallam and himself had all 

neque usuras pro fenerata pecunia a quoquam exigatis. Quod si 
observaveritis, securi in die judicii ante tribunal seterni judicis 
venientes dicetis, Da Domine, quia dedimus; miserere, quia mi- 
sericordiam fecimus; nos implevimus quod jussisti, tu redde quod 
promisisti.” 

I am only concerned with this passage as an instance of great 
misrepresentation : there is enough really bad in Eligius's theology 
to make it unnecessary to make it worse; and after all, how far it 
is Eligius’s doctrine or not is very questionable; for the author of 
his Life merely professes to give the substance of his general 
teaching, to which he devotes eleven folio pages of double columns. 
It does not appear that it is more than a vague traditional impres¬ 
sion of what he used to say; and the Life in which it appears, 
though professing to be written by S. Ouen, has been greatly in¬ 
terpolated, according to Baluze, by a later hand. The above ex¬ 
tract has been made from Baluze’s edition of D’Acherv, 3 vols. 
Folio. Paris, 1723. Yol. II. pp. 96, 97. 


LECTURE I. 


83 


copied from him in reliance on its fidelity, was 
utterly garbled, as you will see for yourselves when 
I read it to you at length. Here then is Eligius 
quoted by successive historians as proving what his 
real words do in fact effectually disprove. Well 
might Niebuhr protest against the practice of mak¬ 
ing quotations at second hand, instead of going our¬ 
selves to the original source. To do this is indeed a 
sort of superficial reading which we cannot be too 
careful to avoid. 

You will therefore, I trust, acquit me of recom¬ 
mending any thing which really deserves the name 
of superficial reading; and yet I think that by fol¬ 
lowing the method which I have suggested, we may 
arrive at a very just and full knowledge of the cha¬ 
racter of the literature of a period, and thereby of 
the period itself, without undergoing any extravagant 
burden of labour, or sacrificing an undue portion of 
time. And by such means, followed up still farther 
by those who have a taste for such studies, by en¬ 
quiring into the state of art, whether in painting, 
sculpture, or architecture, or as exemplified in mat¬ 
ters of common life, we may I think imbue ourselves 
effectually with the spirit of a period, no less than 
with the actual events which it witnessed ; we may 
be able to image it to our minds in detail, and con¬ 
ceive of it as of an object with which we are really 
familiar. 

But is our work now done? Is this full and dis¬ 
tinct impression of the events, characters, institu¬ 
tions, manners, and ways of thinking of any period, 

a 2 


84 


LECTURE I. 


that true historical knowledge which we require ? The 
answer at once is “ No.” What we have attained to 
is no more than antiquarianism, an indispensable ele¬ 
ment in history, but not history itself. Antiquarian¬ 
ism is no teacher of wisdom; on the contrary, few 
things seem more to contract and enfeeble the mind, 
few things differ more widely from that comprehen¬ 
sive view which becomes the true historian. And 
this is a point so important that I must venture to 
dwell upon it a little more particularly. 

What is it that the mere antiquarian wants, and 
which the mere scholar wants also; so that satire, 
sagacious enough in detecting the weak points of 
every character, has often held them both up to 
ridicule ? They have wanted wliat is the essential 
accompaniment to all our knowledge of the past, 
a lively and extensive knowledge of the present; 
they wanted the habit of continually viewing the 
two in combination with each other; they wanted 
that master power, which enables us to take a point 
from which to contemplate both at a distance, and 
so to judge of each and of both as if we belonged to 
neither. For it is from the views so obtained, from 
the conclusions so acquired, that the wisdom is 
formed which may really assist in shaping and pre¬ 
paring the course of the future. 

Antiquarianism, then, is the knowledge of the past 
enjoyed by one who has no lively knowledge of the 
present. Thence it is, when concerned with great 
matters, a dull knowledge. It may be lively in 
little things, it may conceive vividly the shape and 


LECTURE I. 


85 


colour of a dress, or the style of a building, because no 
man can be so ignorant as not to have a distinct no¬ 
tion of these in his own times; he must have a full 
conception of the coat he wears and the house he 
lives in. But the past is reflected to us by the pre¬ 
sent ; so far as we see and understand the present, 
so far we can see and understand the past: so far 
but no farther. And this is the reason why scholars 
and antiquarians, nay, and men calling themselves 
historians also, have written so uninstructively of the 
ancient world: they could do no otherwise, for they 
did not understand the world around them. How 
can he comprehend the parties of other days, who 
has no clear notion of those of his own? What 
sense can he have of the progress of the great con¬ 
test of human affairs in its earlier stages, when it 
rages around him at this actual moment unnoticed, 
or felt to be no more than a mere indistinct hubbub 
of sounds and confusion of weapons ?—what cause is 
at issue in the combat he knows not. Whereas on 
the other hand, he who feels his own times keenly, 
to whom they are a positive reality, with a good and 
evil distinctly perceived in them, such a man will 
write a lively and impressive account of past times, 
even though his knowledge be insufficient, and his 
prejudices strong. This I think is the merit of 
Mitford, and it is a great one. His very antijacobin 
partialities, much as they have interfered with the 
fairness of his history, have yet completely saved it 
from being dull. He took an interest in the parties 
of Greece because he was alive to the parties of his 


80 


LECTURE J. 


own time : he described the popular party in Athens 
just as he would have described the whigs of Eng¬ 
land; he was unjust to Demosthenes because he 
would have been unjust to Mr. Fox. His know¬ 
ledge of the Greek language was limited, and so was 
his learning altogether; but because he was an 
English gentleman who felt and understood the state 
of things around him, and entered warmly into its 
parties, therefore he was able to write a history of 
Greece, which has the great charm of reality; and 
which, if I may judge by my own experience, is read 
at first with interest and retains its hold firmly on 
the memory. 

This is an example of what I mean; and it were 
easy to add others. Raleigh had perhaps less learn¬ 
ing than Mitford; he had at no time of his life the 
leisure or the opportunity to collect a great store of 
antiquarian knowledge. But he had seen life in his 
own times extensively, and entered keenly into its 
various pursuits. Soldier, seaman, court favourite, I 
am afraid we must add, intriguer, war and policy 
were perfectly familiar to him. His accounts there¬ 
fore of ancient affairs have also a peculiar charm; 
they too are a reality; he entered into the difficulties 
of ancient generals from remembering what he had 
himself experienced; he related their gallant actions 
with all his heart, recollecting what he had himself 
seen and done. Now I am well aware that this 
lively notion of our own times is extraneous to any 
course of historical study, and depends on other 
causes than those with which we are concerned now. 


LECTURE I. 


87 


And farther, even under favourable circumstances, it 
can scarcely be attained in perfection by a young- 
man, whose experience of life and its business is ne¬ 
cessarily scanty. But where it does not exist, it is 
of importance that we should be aware of the great¬ 
ness of the defect, and to take care lest while it de¬ 
stroys the benefit of our historical studies, they in 
their turn should aggravate it, and thus each should 
go on with an effect reciprocally injurious. And we 
should try, if not by the most effectual means then 
by some of inferior virtue, to prevent our historical 
studies from becoming mere antiquarianism. Ac¬ 
cordingly, after having made ourselves familiar with 
the spirit of any given period from a study of the 
different writers of the period itself, we should turn 
to a history of it written by a modern writer, and 
observe how its peculiarities accord with those of a 
different age, and what judgment is passed by pos¬ 
terity upon its favourite views and practices. It 
does not follow that this judgment is to be an in¬ 
fallible guide to ours, but it is useful to listen to it, 
for in some points it will certainly be true, and its 
very difference from the judgment of our earlier 
period, even where it runs into an opposite extreme, 
is of itself worth attending to. And thus by seeing 
what was underrated once receiving its due and per¬ 
haps more than its due honour at a subsequent period, 
and by observing that what is now unjustly slighted 
was in times past excessively overvalued, we shall 
escape that Quixotism of zeal, whether for or against 
any particular institution, which is apt to be the re- 


88 


LECTURE I. 


suit of a limited knowledge; as if what we now find 
over honoured or too much despised, had never 
undergone the opposite fate ; as if it were for us now 
to redress for the first time the injustice of fortune, 
and to make up by the vehemence of our admiration 
for centuries of contempt, or by our scorn for centuries 
of blind veneration. 

We may hope that such a comparison of the views 
of different periods will save us from one of the be¬ 
setting faults of minds raised a little above the mass, 
but not arrived at any high pitch of wisdom ; I mean 
the habit either of sneering at or extravagantly ex¬ 
alting the age in which we ourselves live. At the 
same time I am inclined to think that although both 
are faulty, yet the temptation is far greater to under¬ 
value our own age than to overvalue it. I am not 
speaking, be it observed, of the mass of mere ordinary 
minds, but of those which possess some portion of 
intelligence and cultivation. Our personal superiority 
seems much more advanced by decrying our con¬ 
temporaries than by decrying our fathers. The dead 
are not our real rivals, nor is pride very much grati¬ 
fied by asserting a superiority over those who cannot 
deny it. But if we run down the living, that is, 
those with whom our whole competition exists, what 
do we but exalt ourselves, as having at any rate that 
great mark of superior wisdom, that we discern de¬ 
ficiency where others find nothing but matter of 
admiration. It is far more tempting to personal 
vanity to think ourselves the only wise amongst a 
generation of fools, than to glory in belonging to a 


LECTURE I. 


89 


wise generation, where our personal wisdom, be it 
what it may, cannot at least have the distinction of 
singularity. 

Thus far then we seem to have proceeded in our 
outline of the course of reading to be pursued by the 
historical student. It has combined at present two 
points, a full knowledge of the particular period which 
we choose to study, as derived from a general 
acquaintance with its contemporary literature, and 
then what I may call a knowledge of its bearings 
with respect to other and later periods, and not 
least with respect to our own times; that is to say, 
how succeeding ages have judged of it, how far their 
sympathies have gone along with its own in admir¬ 
ing what it admired; and as collected from this 
judgment, how far it coloured the times which 
followed it; in other words, what part it has played 
for good or for evil in the great drama of the world’s 
history; what of its influence has survived and what 
has perished. And he who has so studied and so un¬ 
derstood one period, deserves the praise generally of 
understanding history. For to know all history 
actually is impossible ; our object should be to pos¬ 
sess the power of knowing any portion of history 
twhich we wish to learn, at a less cost of labour and 
with far greater certainty of success than belong to 
other men. For by our careful study of some one 
period, we have learnt a method of proceeding with 
all; so that if we open any history, its facts at once 
fall into their proper places, indicating their causes, 
implying their consequences; we have gained also a 


90 


LECTURE 1. 


measure of their value, teaching us what are pro¬ 
ductive, and what are barren, what will combine with 
other facts, and establish and illustrate a truth, and 
what in our present state of knowledge are isolated, 
of no worth in themselves, and leading to nothing. 
This will be still more apparent, when we come to 
examine more carefully our student’s process in 
mastering the history of any one period; for hitherto, 
you will observe, I have said nothing of the difficul¬ 
ties or questions which will occur to him in his 
reading; I have only said generally what he should 
read. 

I purpose then in the following lectures to notice 
some of the principal difficulties or questions which 
the historical student will encounter, whether the 
period which he has chosen belong to the times of 
imperfect or of advanced civilization: for the 
questions in each of these are not altogether the 
same. And I will begin with the difficulties pre¬ 
sented by the history of a period of imperfect civiliza¬ 
tion. 




LECTURE II. 


The first step which I ventured to recommend in 
the study of the history of any period, was, that we 
should take some one contemporary historian, and if 
we were studying the history of any one country in 
particular, then it should be also an historian of that 
country, and that we should so gain our first intro¬ 
duction both to the events and to the general cha¬ 
racter of the times. I am now to consider what dif¬ 
ficulties and what questions will be likely to present 
themselves in reading such an historian, interfering, 
if not answered, with our deriving from him all the 
instruction which he is capable of rendering. Now 
you will observe that I am purposely looking out for 
the difficulties in history, but I am very far from pro¬ 
fessing to be able to solve them. Still I think that 
what I am doing may be very useful: because to 
direct attention to what is to be done is the best 
means of procuring that it shall be done. And 
farther, an enterprising student will be rather en¬ 
couraged by hearing that the work is not all done to 


92 


LECTURE II. 


/ 


his hands; he will be glad to find that the motto 
upon history, in spite of all that has been lately ac¬ 
complished, is still “ Plus ultra: ” the actual bound¬ 
ary reached is not the final one; every bold and able 
adventurer in this wide ocean may hope to obtain 
the honours of a discoverer of countries hitherto un¬ 
known. 

In the first place I said that the difficulties and 
questions which occurred in reading an historian of a 
period of imperfect civilization, were not in all re¬ 
spects the same which we should meet with in an 
historian of a more advanced age. This leads me 
naturally to consider what constitutes the difference 
between these two classes of historians, before I pro¬ 
ceed to the proper subject of this lecture, the 
questions namely suggested by the former class, or 
those of a period imperfectly civilized. 

There are some‘persons whose prejudices are so 
violent against their own age, and that immediately 
preceding it, that they take offence at their claim 
to a higher civilization, and will by no means allow 
the earlier centuries of modern history to have been 
their inferiors in this respect. For my own part, I 
should find it very difficult, even if I thought it de¬ 
sirable, to relinquish the habitual language of our 
age; which calls itself civilized, and the middle ages 
as in comparison half civilized, not in the spirit of 
controversy or of boasting, but as a simple matter of 
fact. However, I do not wish to assume any con¬ 
clusion at the outset which may be supposed to be 
disputable; and therefore, I will not if I can help it 


LECTURE II. 


93 


use the terms more or less civilized as applied to the 
earlier or later periods of modern history, but will 
state the difference between them in more neutral 
language. For that there is a difference will scarcely 
I think be disputed: or that this difference coincides 
chronologically, or nearly so, with the sixteenth cen¬ 
tury ; so that the historians prior to this period up 
to the very beginning of modern history, have, 
speaking generally, one character; and those who 
flourished subsequently to it have another. And 
farther, I cannot think it disputable, that the great 
historians of Greece and Rome resemble for the 
most part the historians of the last two or three cen¬ 
turies, and differ from those of the early or middle 
ages. 

Now without using the invidious words, “civilized” 
or “ half civilized,” the difference may be stated thus; 
that the writers of the early and middle ages be¬ 
longed to a period in which the active elements were 
fewer, and the views generally prevalent were there¬ 
fore fewer also. Fewer in two ways, first inasmuch 
as the classes or orders of society which expressed 
themselves actively in word or deed were fewer; and 
then, as there were very much fewer individual va¬ 
rieties amongst members of the same class. Hence 
therefore the history of the early ages is simple; that 
of later times is complicated. In the former the 
active elements were kings, popes, bishops, lords, and 
knights, with exceptions here and there of remark¬ 
able individuals; but generally speaking the other 
elements of society were passive. In later times, on 


94 


LECTURE II. 


the other hand, other orders of men have been taking 
their part actively; and the number of these appears 
to be continually increasing. So that the number of 
views of human life, and the number of agencies at 
work upon it, are multiplied ; the difficulty of judg¬ 
ing between them all theoretically is very great: that 
of adjusting their respective claims practically is al¬ 
most insuperable. Again, in later times, the indi¬ 
vidual differences between members of the same 
class or order have been far greater; for while the 
common class or professional influence has still been 
powerful, yet the restraint from without having been 
removed, which forced the individual to abstain from 
disputing that influence, the tendencies of men’s in¬ 
dividual minds have worked freely, and where these 
were strong, they have modified the class or pro¬ 
fessional influence variously, and have thus produced 
a great variety of theories on the same subject. The 
introduction of new classes or bodies of men into the 
active elements of society may be exemplified by the 
increased importance in later times of the science 
of political economy, while the individual variety 
amongst those of the same order is shewn by the va¬ 
rious theories which have been advanced at different 
times by different economical writers. This will ex¬ 
plain what I mean, when I divide the historians of 
modern history into two classes, and when I call the 
one class, that belonging to a simpler state of things; 

and the other that belonging to a state more compli¬ 
cated. 

We are now, you will remember, concerned with 


LECTURE II. 


95 


the writers of the first class; and as a specimen of 
these in their simplest form, we will take the Church 
History of the Venerable Bede. This work has been 
lately published, 1838, in a convenient form, 1 vol. 
8vo, by the English Historical Society; and it is 
their edition to which my references have been 
made. I need scarcely remind you of the date and 
circumstances of Bede’s life. Born in 674, only fifty 
years after the flight of Mahomet from Mecca, he 
died at the age of sixty-one, in 735, two or three 
years after that great victory of Charles Martel over 
the Saracens, which delivered France and Europe 
from Mahometan conquest. At seven years old he 
was placed under the care of the abbot of Wear- 
mouth, and from that monastery he removed to the 
neighbouring one of Jarrow, and there passed the 
remainder of his life. He was ordained deacon in 
his nineteenth year, and priest in his thirtieth, and 
beyond these two events we know nothing of his ex¬ 
ternal life except his writings. These are various, 
and he himself, at the conclusion of his Ecclesiasti¬ 
cal History, has left us a list of them:—they consist 
of commentaries on almost all the books of Scrip¬ 
ture, of treatises on some scriptural subjects, of re¬ 
ligious biographies, of a book of hymns; and of some 
of a different character, on general history and chro¬ 
nology, a book de orthographia, and another de 
metrica arte. His Ecclesiastical History, in five 
books, embraces the period from Augustine’s arrival 
in 597, down to the year 731, only four years before 
his own death; so that for a considerable portion of 


06 


LECTURE II. 


the time to which it relates his work is a contempo¬ 
rary history. 

In Bede we shall find no political questions of any 
kind to create any difficulty, nor are there those 
varied details of war and peace which, before they 
can be vividly comprehended, require a certain de¬ 
gree of miscellaneous knowledge. I may notice then 
in him one or two things which belong more or less 
to all history. First, his language. We derive, or 
ought to derive from our philological studies, a 
great advantage in this respect; w T e ought to have 
acquired in some degree the habit of regarding lan¬ 
guage critically, and of interpreting it correctly. 
This is not a trifling matter; for as an immense 
majority of histories must be written in a foreign 
language, it is very possible for a careless reader, 
who has never been trained as we have been 
from our earliest years in grammatical analysis, to 
make important mistakes as to the meaning of his 
author; for translation, to be thoroughly good, must 
be a matter of habit, and must be grounded on such 
a minutely accurate process as we are early trained 
to in our study of Greek and Latin writers. It must 
be grounded on such a process, the great value of 
which is, that it hinders us from neglecting little 
words, conjunctions especially, on which so large a 
portion of the meaning of continuous writing de¬ 
pends, and which a careless reader not so trained is 
apt to pass over. But there is a higher step in trans¬ 
lation which is by no means a mere matter of orna¬ 
ment, and which I believe is not always attended to 


LECTURE II. 


97 


as it deserves even amongst ourselves. I mean 
translation as distinguished from construing; a pro¬ 
cess which retains all the accuracy of the earlier 
habit; its searching view into every corner, so to 
speak, of the passage to be translated; its apprecia¬ 
tion of every little word, of every shade of distinc¬ 
tion in mood or tense; but from this accuracy makes 
its way to another still more perfect: the exact ex¬ 
pression of the mind of the original, so that the 
feelings excited by the translation, the images con¬ 
veyed by the words, the force of their arrangement, 
their tone, whether serious or half playful, should be 
the exact representation of the original. And in 
this greater accuracy construing must always be de¬ 
ficient, because the grammatical order of one lan¬ 
guage is not the same as that of another, and to 
keejD the real order, which is of great importance to 
the fidelity of the translation, the grammatical order 
must often be sacrificed. I have ventured to say 
thus much, because I have continually had occasion 
to feel the difficulty of good translation, and because 
in this respect our admirable classical system is apt, 
I think, to forego one of its great advantages, that 
in the habit of viva voce translation, as opposed to 
construing, we have an exercise at once in the two 
great subjects of grammar and rhetoric,—an exercise 
in extemporaneous composition in our own language 
to which none other is comparable, no less than an 
exercise in the language from which we are trans¬ 
lating. 

To return, however, to the language of Bede. 

h 


98 


LECTURE II. 


We in one way may have a source of error peculiarly 
our own; that is, our almost exclusive familiarity 
with classical Latin is sometimes apt to mislead us, 
when we transfer its rules, and its senses of words, 
without hesitation, to the Latin of what are called 
the low or middle ages. As a single and very fami¬ 
liar instance of the difference between classical Latin 
and low Latin I may notice the perpetual usage of 
the conjunction “ quia ” in the latter in the sense of 
the Greek on. “ Nosti quia ad tui oris imperium 
semper vivere studui,” “ Thou knowest that I have 
ever been careful to live in obedience to thy words;” 
iv. 29. This occurs in the Latin of unclassical 
writers continually; I do not know what is the 
earliest instance of it, but it is frequent in the Latin' 
version of the Scriptures which was used by the 
western churches before Jerome’s time, and in the 
old Latin translation of Irenseus. Facciolati gives 
no instance of it in any classical writer, except we 
choose to bestow that title on Palladius, one of the 
agricultural writers, whose date is not known, but 
who certainly did not flourish earlier than the third 
century, or the very end of the second, inasmuch as 
he quotes Apuleius, who lived under M. Aurelius 
Antoninus. Besides this, it is always worth while 
in reading the Latin of the lower ages to observe the 
gradual introduction of words of Barbarian orio-in 

to 5 

such as scabini , scaccarium , marchio , batallum , and in- 
numeiable others of which the pages of Ducange are 
full But of these, very few, perhaps no certain in¬ 
stance, is to be found in Bede. 


LECTURE II. 


99 


Another question comes before us in the history of 
Bede, which also is common to all history, although 
in him and in the other writers of the middle ages it 
often takes a peculiar form. I mean the great 
question of the trustworthiness of historians; on 
what grounds and to what degree we may venture 
to yield our belief to what we read in them. In 
Bede and in many others the question takes this 
form, What credit is to be attached to the frequent 
stories of miracles or of wonders which occur in 
their narratives? And it is this peculiar form of it 
which I would wish to notice now. The question is 
not an easy one, and I must here remind you of 
what I said at the beginning of this lecture, that 
while pointing out the difficulties of history, I was 
very far from professing to be able always to solve 
them. 

You will, I think, allow that the difficulty here 
relates much more to miracles than to mere wonders. 
By the term miracle we imply I think two things 
which do not exist in mere wonders; two things or 
perhaps more properly one, that God is not only the 
author of the wonderful work, but that it is wrought 
for us to observe and be influenced by it; whereas a 
wonder is no doubt God’s work also, but it is not 
wrought so far as we can discern for our sakes, 
so far as we are concerned it is a work without an 
object. Being therefore wholly ignorant of the nature 
and object of wonders, and being ignorant of a great 
many natural laws, by which they may be produced, 
the question of their credibility resolves itself into 

h 2 


100 


LECTURE II. 


little more than a mere question as to the credibility of 
the witnesses; there is little room for considerations 
of internal evidence as to the time and circumstances 
when the wonder is said to have happened. The 
internal evidence only comes in with respect to our 
knowledge of the law, which the wonder is supposed 
to violate: in proportion to our observations of its 
comprehensiveness and its unbroken observance, 
would be our unwillingness to believe that it had 
been ever departed from. And thus I suppose that 
any deviation from the observed laws with respect to 
the heavenly bodies, as, for instance, to the time of 
the sun’s rising or setting, if we looked upon it as a 
mere wonder and not as a miracle, we should 
scarcely be persuaded by any weight of evidence to 
believe: or to speak more correctly, if the weight of 
evidence were overwhelmingly great, we should be 
obliged to regard the phenomenon as a miracle, and 
not as a wonder; as a sign given by God for our in¬ 
struction. But in a great number of cases, we may 
admit the existence of a wonder without seeing any 
reason to conclude that it is a miracle. A man may 
appear ridiculous if he expresses his belief in any 
particular story of this sort to those who know 
nothing of it but its strangeness. And there is no 
doubt that human folly and human fraud are mixed 
up largely with most accounts of wonders, and render 
it our duty to receive them not with caution merely 
but with unwillingness and suspicion. Yet to say 
that all recorded wonders are false, from those re¬ 
corded by Herodotus down to the latest reports of 


LECTURE II. 


101 


animal magnetism, would be a boldness of assertion 
wholly unjustifiable and extravagant. The accounts 
of wonders then, from Livy’s prodigies downwards, I 
should receive according to Herodotus’s expression 
when speaking of one of them, ovre cnricrTewv, ovtc 
7 TLo-Tevcov ti Xcrjv : sometimes considering of what fact 
they were an exaggerated or corrupted representa¬ 
tion, at other times trying to remember whether any 
and how many other notices occur of the same thing, 
and whether they are of force enough to lead us to 
search for some law hitherto undiscovered, to which 
they may all be referred, and become hereafter the 
foundation of a new science. 

But when a wonderful thing is represented as a 
miracle, the question becomes far graver and far 
more complicated. Moral and religious consider¬ 
ations then come in unavoidably, and involve some 
of the deepest questions of theology. What is 
reported as a miracle may be either the answer 
to the believing prayer of a Christian, or it may 
be the working of one of the gifts of the Holy 
Spirit, or it may be a special sign sent from God for 
a special mercy or judgment in the particular case, 
and for the instruction and warning of others. And 
whichever of these kinds it may be, the question 
follows, why then are miracles not performed in 
every age and in every Christian country ? And if 
they are not, are the ages and countries thus ex¬ 
cepted, to be considered as having fallen away from 
the faith, and to have forfeited what is properly a 
perpetual privilege of Christianity, to have God 


102 


LECTURE II. 


visibly and sensibly near to us? Say that we ac¬ 
quiesce in this conclusion, yet proceeding to regard 
the question in this point of view, is it embarrassed 
with no difficulties? Is it possible to deny that the 
individuals, the churches, and the times, which ap¬ 
pear to have been left without miracles, have dis¬ 
played other and even more unquestionable signs of 
God’s presence amongst them; signs which have not 
always existed with peculiar brightness where 
miracles are alleged to have most abounded ? Or 
again, Can it be denied that the times and the 
writers where these miraculous accounts are to be 
found, were generally, as compared with those 
where they are wanting, apt to take little pains in 
their examination of truth, of such truth, I mean, as 
their previous state of mind did not dispose them to 
question? We see this from their accounts of 
points of natural history; how few of these can be 
depended upon, and what extravagant and palpable 
fables were transmitted from generation to genera¬ 
tion. It is enough to notice the famous story of the 
barnacle tree, which dropped its fruit into the water, 
and the fruit cracked, and out swam a gosling. 
Bede’s accounts of natural objects are few, but it so 
happens that one of these relates to a place with 
which I have been acquainted all my life, and its in¬ 
correctness is remarkable. He says that in the 
Solent sea, which separates the Isle of Wight from 
Hampshire, “ two tides of the ocean, breaking forth 
round Britain from the boundless Northern ocean, 
meet every day in mutual conflict with each other 


LECTURE II. 


103 


beyond the mouth of the river of Homelea, (Hamble,) 
and after their conflict is over they sweep back to 
* the ocean, and return to the place from whence they 
came.” a Who could recognise in this description 
the sort of race which runs at certain times of the 
tide and in rough weather over the shoal called the 
Brambles, or the slight agitation sometimes pro¬ 
duced, not by the conflicting tides of the Solent sea 
itself, but by the ebb of the Southampton or Hamble 
river meeting at an angle with the tide of the Solent. 
We have to weigh then this fact in the character of 
Bede and other such historians, and this added to 
the religious difficulty noticed above, may incline us 
rather to take the opposite conclusion, and limiting 
miracles to the earliest times of Christianity, refuse 
our belief to all those which are reported by the his¬ 
torians of subsequent centuries. 

Yet, again, this conclusion has its difficulties. We 
may not like to refuse assent to so many statements 
of so many writers, of men, so far as we know, who 
believe that they were speaking the truth. And we 
may be taxed with inconsistency in stopping our 
scepticism arbitrarily as it may seem when we 
arrive at the first century, and according to the 
miracles of the Gospels that belief which we refuse 
to those of ecclesiastical history. This last charge, 
however, we may satisfactorily repel. The miracles 
of the Gospel and those of later history do not stand 
on the same ground. I do not think that they 
stand on the same ground of external evidence; 

a Histor. Ecclesiast. iv. 10. 


104 


LECTURE II. 


I cannot think that the unbelieving spirit of the 
Roman world in the first century was equally favour¬ 
able to the origination and admission of stories of 
miracles, with the credulous tendencies of the middle 
ages. But the difference goes far deeper than this 
to all those who can appreciate the other evidences 
of Christianity, and who therefore feel that in the 
one case what we call miracles were but the natural 
accompaniments, if I may so speak, of the Christian 
revelation; accompaniments, the absence of which 
would have been far more wonderful than their 
presence. This, as I may almost call it, this a 'priori 
probability in favour of the miracles of the Gospel 
cannot be said to exist in favour of those of later 
history. 

Disembarrassed then of this painful parallel, and 
able to judge freely of the miraculous stories of Bede 
and other historians, without feeling our whole 
Christian faith to rest on the decision, it will not 
however follow, as some appear to think, that we 
shall riot as it were in a full license of unbelief, or 
that a reasonable mind will exercise no belief in re¬ 
ligious matters except such as it dares not withhold. 
Some appear to be unable to conceive of belief or 
unbelief except as having some ulterior object; “ we 
believe this, because we love it; we disbelieve it, be¬ 
cause we wish it to be disproved.” There is, how¬ 
ever, in minds more healthfully constituted, a belief 
and a disbelief grounded solely upon the evidence of 
the case, arising neither out of partiality nor out of 
prejudice against the supposed conclusions which 


LECTURE II. 


105 


may result from its truth or falsehood. And in such 
a spirit the historical student will consider the cases 
of Bede’s and other historians’ miracles. He will, I 
think, as a general rule disbelieve them; for the im¬ 
mense multitude which he finds recorded, and which 
I suppose no credulity could believe in, shews suf¬ 
ficiently that on this point there was a total want of 
judgment and a blindness of belief generally existing 
which makes the testimony wholly insufficient; and 
while the external evidence in favour of these alleged 
miracles is so unsatisfactory, there are, for the most 
part, strong internal improbabilities against them. 
But with regard to some miracles, he will see that 
there is no strong a priori improbability in their oc¬ 
currence, but rather the contrary; as, for instance, 
where the first missionaries of the Gospel in a bar¬ 
barous country are said to have been assisted by a 
manifestation of the spirit of power, and if the evi¬ 
dence appears to warrant his belief, he will readily 
and gladly yield it. And in doing so he will have 
the countenance of a great man a , who in his frag¬ 
ment of English history has not hesitated to express 
the same sentiments. Nor will he be unwilling, but 
most thankful, to find sufficient grounds for believing 
that not only at the beginning of the Gospel but in 
ages long afterwards, believing prayer has received 
extraordinary answers, that it has been heard even in 
more than it might have dared to ask for. Yet 
again, if the gift of faith—the gift as distinguished 
from the grace—of the faith which removes raoun- 

a Burke. 


100 


LECTURE II. 


tains, has been given to any in later times in remark¬ 
able measure, the mighty works which such faith 
may have wrought cannot be incredible in them¬ 
selves to those who remember our Lord’s promise; 
and if it appears from satisfactory evidence that they 
were wrought actually, we shall believe them, and 
believe with joy. Only as it is in most cases im¬ 
possible to admit the trustworthiness of the evi¬ 
dence, our minds must remain at the most in a state 
of suspense, and I do not know why it is necessary 
to come to any positive decision. For if we think 
that supposing the miracle to be true, it gives the 
seal of God’s approbation to all the belief of him 
who performed it, this is manifestly a most hasty 
and untenable inference. The gift of faith does not 
imply the gift of wisdom, nor is every believing 
Christian, whose prayer God may hear in an extra¬ 
ordinary manner, endued also with an exemption 
from error. Men’s gifts are infinitely different, dis¬ 
tinct from each other, as from God’s gifts of inward 
grace; unequal in value outwardly, the highest, it 
may be, of less value spiritually to its possessor than 
the humblest grace of him who has no remarkable 
gift at all. Yet the grace cannot do the work of 
the gift, nor the higher gift the work of the meaner; 
nor may he who can work miracles claim therefore 
the gift of understanding the Scripture, and inter¬ 
preting it with infallible truth. Cyprian said of the 
martyrs, when he thought that they were impairing 
the discipline of the church by granting tickets of 
communion over hastily to the Lapsi, or those who 


LECTURE II. 


107 


had fallen away in the persecutions, “ The martyrs 
do not make the Gospel, for it is through the Gospel 
that they acquire the glory of martyrdom.” a And 
so we might say of certain miracles, if there were 
any such, wrought by persons who had in many 
points grievously corrupted the Christian faith, 
“ Miracles must not be allowed to overrule the 
Gospel; for it is only through our belief in the 
Gospel that we accord our belief to them.” 

I do not make any apology for the length of this 
discussion, because the subject was one which lay 
directly in our way, and could not be passed over 
hastily; and I am never averse to shewing how 
closely connected are those studies which we will 
attempt to divide by the names religious and secular, 
injuring both by trying to separate them. Let us 
now proceed with our review of the difficulties of 
history, and still confining ourselves to what I have 
called the simpler period, we will pass on however 
from the eighth to the thirteenth century, and briefly 
notice some of the questions which suggest them¬ 
selves when we read Matthew Paris, or, still more, 
any of the French, German, or Italian historians of 
the same period. 

The thirteenth century contains in it at its begin¬ 
ning the most splendid period of the papacy, the 
time of Innocent the Third ; its end coincides with 
that great struggle between Boniface the Eighth and 
Philip the Fair, which marks the first stage of its 

a Cyprian Epist. xxvii. a Minime consideravit quod non mar- 
tyres Evangelium faciant, sed per Evangelium martyres fiant.” 


108 


LECTUllE II. 


decline. It contains the reign of Frederick the 
Second, and his long contests with the popes in Italy; 
the foundation of the orders of friars, Dominican 
and Franciscan; the last period of the crusades, and 
the age of the greatest glory of the schoolmen. 
Thus full of matters of interest as it is, it will yet 
be found that all its interest is more or less connected 
with two great questions concerning the church; 
namely, the power of the priesthood in matters of 
government and in matters of faith ; the merits of 
the contest between the papacy and the kings of 
Europe; the nature and character of that influence 
over men’s minds which affected the whole philosophy 
of the period, the whole intellectual condition of the 
Christian world. 

It would be out of place here altogether to enter 
at large into either of these questions. But it is 
closely connected with my subject, to notice one or 
two points as to the method of studying them. I 
observed in my first lecture, that after studying the 
history of any period in its own contemporary writers, 
it was desirable also to study the view of it enter¬ 
tained by a later period, as whether more or less true, 
it was sure to be different, and would probably afford 
some truth in which the contemporary view was 
deficient. This holds good with the thirteenth 
century as with other periods ; it is quite important 
that we should see it as it appears in the eyes of later 
times, no less than as it appears in its own. But the 
questions of the thirteenth century, if I am right in 
saying that they are connected with the church, 


LECTURE II. 


109 


require especially that our view should be cast back¬ 
wards as well as forwards; we should regard them 
not only as they appear to later times, but to a time 
far earlier; the merits or demerits of the papacy 
must be tried with reference to the original system 
of Christianity, not as exhibited only in what is called 
the early church, but much more as exhibited in 
Scripture. Is the church system of Innocent the 
Third, either in faith or in government, the system 
of the New Testament ? That the two differ widely 
is certain ; but is one the developement of the other? 
Is the spirit of both the same, with no other alter¬ 
ation than one merely external, such as must be 
found in passing from the infancy of the church to 
its maturity ? Or is the spirit altogether different, so 
that the later system is not the developement of the 
earlier, but its perversion ? And then follows the 
enquiry, intensely interesting to those who are able 
to pursue it, what is the history of this perversion, 
and how far is it unlike merely, without being cor¬ 
rupted from, the Gospel; for the perversion may not 
extend through every part of it; there may be in it 
differences from the original system which are merely 
external; there may be in it, even where superficially 
considered it is at variance with the scriptural system, 
there may be in it developement merely in some 
instances while there is perversion in others. Only 
it is essential that we do not look at the first century 
through the medium of the thirteenth, nor through 
the medium of any earlier century : the judge’s words 
must not be taken according to the advocate’s sense 


110 


LECTURE II. 


of them: the first century is to determine our 
judgment of the second, and of all subsequent 
centuries; it will not do to assume that the judgment 
must be interpreted by the very practices and opinions 
the merits of which it has to try. 

We may, however, choose rather to look at the 
outside of the middle ages than penetrate to the 
deeper principles which are involved in their contests 
and their condition. We may study the chroniclers 
rather, who paint the visible face of things with ex¬ 
ceeding liveliness, however little they may be able or 
may choose to descend to what lies within. And as 
a specimen of these we may take one of the latest 
of their number, the celebrated Philip de Comines. 

Philip de Comines came from the small town of 
that name near Lisle in Flanders, and was thus born 
a subject of the dukes of Burgundy, in the reign of 
Duke Philip the Good, in the year 1445. He served 
Duke Philip, and his son Duke Charles the Bold, 
but left the latter and went over to the service of 
Louis the Eleventh in 1472, by whom he was em¬ 
ployed in his most important and confidential affairs. 
He was present with Louis during the last scenes of 
his life at Plessis les Tours; he lived through the 
reign of Charles the Eighth with great varieties of 
fortune, being at one time shut up in prison, and at 
another employed in honourable and important duties, 
and he died in the reign of Louis the Twelfth. His 
Memoirs embrace a period of thirty-four years, from 
1464, when he first entered into the service of Duke 
Charles of Burgundy, then count of Charolois, to 


LECTURE II. 


Ill 


tlie death of King Charles the Eighth in 1498. 
Thus they are not only a contemporary history, but 
relate mostly to transactions which the writer 
actually witnessed, or in which he was more or less 
concerned. 

Philip de Comines has been called the father of 
modern history, a title which would class him with 
the writers of the second, or what I have called the 
more complicated period. But it seems to me that 
he belongs entirely to the simpler period ; and this 
is most apparent when we compare him with Machia- 
velli, who, although almost his contemporary, yet 
does in his whole style, and in the tone of his mind, 
really belong to the later period. Thus in Philip de 
Comines we meet with scarcely any thing of the 
great political questions which arose in the next 
century; his Memoirs paint the wars and intrigues 
carried on by one prince against another for the mere 
purpose of enlarging his dominions; and, except in 
the revolts of Liege against the Duke of Burgundy, 
we see no symptoms of any thing like a war of 
opinion. We get then only a view of the external 
appearance of things; and meet with no other dif¬ 
ficulties than such as arise from a want of sufficient 
circumstantial knowledge to enable us to realize his 
pictures fully. 

And here I cannot but congratulate ourselves in 
this place on those habits of careful sifting and 
analysis which we either have, or ought to have 
gained, from our classical studies. Take any large 
work of a classical historian, and with what niceness 


112 


LECTURE II. 


of attention have we been accustomed to read it. 
How many books have we consulted in illustration of 
its grammatical difficulties, how have we studied our 
maps to become familiar with its geography; what 
various aids have we employed to throw light on its 
historical allusions, on every office or institution 
casually named; on all points of military detail, the 
divisions of the army, the form of the camp, the 
nature of the weapons and engines used in battles or 
in sieges; or on all matters of private life, points of 
law, of domestic economy, of general usages and 
manners. In this way we penetrate an ancient 
history by a thousand passages, we explore every 
thing contained in it; if some points remain obscure, 
they stand apart from the rest for that very reason 
distinctly remembered, the very page in which they 
occur is familiar to us. We are already trained, 
therefore, in the process of studying history 
thoroughly; and we have only to repeat for Philip 
de Comines, or any other writer on whom we may 
have fixed our choice, the very same method which 
we have been accustomed to employ with Herodotus 
and Thucydides. 

At the same time it is fair to add, that this pro¬ 
cess with a modern historian is accidentally much 
more difficult. For the ancient writers we have our 
helps ready at hand, well-known, cheap and access¬ 
ible. The school-boy has his Ainsworth or his 
Donnegan; he has his small atlas of ancient maps, 
his compendium of Greek or Roman antiquities, his 
abridgments of Greek and Roman history. The more 


LECTURE II. 


113 


advanced student has his Facciolati, his Schneidey, 
or his Passow; his more elaborate atlas, his fuller 
histories, his vast collections of Greek and Roman 
antiquities, to which all the learning of Europe has 
contributed its aid. How different is the case with 
the history of the middle ages! If there are any 
cheap or compendious helps for the study of them, I 
must profess my ignorance of them. There may be 
many, known on the Continent if not in England, 
but I am unable to mention them. For the Latin of 
the middle ages, I know of nothing in a smaller form 
than Adelung’s abridged edition of Ducange; yet 
this abridgment consists of six thick octavos. Maps 
accommodated to the geography of the middle ages, 
and generally accessible, there are I think, at least 
in England, none a . We have nothing I think for 
the history of the middle ages answering in fulness 
and convenience to that book so well known to us 
all, Lempriere’s Classical Dictionary. For anti¬ 
quities, laws, manners, customs, &c., many large and 
valuable works might be named,—many sources of 
information scattered about in different places; let 
me name several excellent papers by Lancelot, St. 
Palaye, and others, occurring in the volumes of the 
Memoirs of the French Academy,—but a cheap 
popular compendium like our old acquaintances 
Adam and Potter, or the more improved works 
which are now superseding them, does not, I believe, 

a An atlas of this kind, however, exhibiting the several coun¬ 
tries of Europe at successive periods, is now in the course of pub¬ 
lication in Germany. 

I 


114 


LECTURE II. 


exist. My object in stating this is twofold; first, be¬ 
cause to state publicly the want is likely perhaps to 
excite some one or other to make it good; and 
secondly, to point out again to you how invaluable is 
the time which you are passing in this place, inas¬ 
much as the libraries here furnish you with that in¬ 
formation in abundance which to any one settled in 
the country is in ordinary cases inaccessible. 

But to return to Philip de Comines. We find 
well exemplified in him one of the peculiarities of 
modern history, as distinguished from that of Greece 
and Rome, the importance namely of attending to 
genealogies. Many of the wars of modern Europe 
have been succession wars; questions of disputed 
inheritance, where either competitor claimed to be 
the legal heir of the last undoubted possessor of 
the crown. Of such a nature were the great 
French wars in Italy in the fifteenth and sixteenth 
centuries, of which Comines witnessed and has re¬ 
corded the beginning. And this same thing shews 
us also how impossible it is to study any age 
by itself, how necessarily our enquiries run back 
into previous centuries, how instinctively we look 
forward to the results in a succeeding period of what 
we are now studying in its origin. For instance, 
Comines records the marriage of Mary duchess of 
Burgundy, daughter and sole heiress of Charles the 
Bold, with Maximilian archduke of Austria. This 
marriage, conveying all the dominions of Burgundy 
to Maximilian and his heirs, established a great in¬ 
dependent sovereign on the frontiers of France, 


LECTURE TT. 


115 


giving to him on the north, not only the present 
kingdoms of Holland and Belgium, but large por¬ 
tions of what is now French territory, the old pro¬ 
vinces of Artoise and French Flanders, French Hain- 
ault and French Luxembourg: while on the east it 
gave him Franche Comte, thus yielding him a foot¬ 
ing within the Jura, on the very banks of the Saone. 
Thence ensued, in after ages, when the Spanish 
branch of the house of Austria had inherited this 
part of its dominions, the long contests which de¬ 
luged the Netherlands with blood, the campaigns of 
King William and Luxembourg, the nine years of 
efforts no less skilful than valiant, in which Marl¬ 
borough broke his way through the fortresses of the 
iron frontier. Again, when Spain became in a 
manner French by the accession of the house of 
Bourbon, the Netherlands reverted once more to 
Austria itself; and from thence the powers of 
Europe advanced almost in our own days to assail 
France as a republic; and on this ground, on the 
plains of Fleurus, was won the first of those great 
victories which for nearly twenty years carried the 
French standards triumphantly over Europe. Thus 
the marriage recorded by Comines has been working 
busily down to our very own times: it is only since 
the settlement of 1814, and that more recent one of 
1830, that the Netherlands have ceased to be af¬ 
fected by the union of Charles the Bold’s daughter 
with Maximilian of Austria. 

Again, Comines records the expedition of Charles 
the Eighth of France into Italy to claim the crown 

i 2 


116 


LECTURE II. 


of Naples. He found the throne filled by a prince 
of the house of Arragon. A Frenchman and a 
Spaniard contend for the inheritance of the most 
southern kingdom of Italy. We are obliged to un¬ 
roll somewhat more of the scroll of time than the 
part which was at first lying open before us, in order 
to make this part intelligible. The French king re¬ 
presented the house of Anjou, the elder branch of 
which, more than two centuries earlier, had been in¬ 
vited by the pope into Italy to uphold the Guelf or 
papal cause against the Ghibelines or party of the 
emperors; headed as it was by Manfred king of 
Naples, son of the Swabian emperor of the house of 
Hohenstaufen, Frederick the Second. And thus we 
open upon the rich story of the contests in Italy in 
the thirteenth century, the conquering march of 
Charles of Anjou, the unworthy brother of the noblest 
and holiest of monarchs Louis the Ninth; the battle 
of Benevento ; the sad history of the young Conradin, 
Manfred’s nephew,—his defeat at Scurgola under the 
old walls of the Marsian and Felasgian Alba, his cruel 
execution, the transferring of his claims to Peter of 
Arragon who had married his cousin Constance, 
Manfred’s daughter, the tragedy of the Sicilian 
vespers, and the enthroning of the Arragoneze 
monarch in Sicily. All these earlier events, and the 
extinction subsequently of the elder branch of the 
house of Anjou ; the crimes and misfortunes of queen 
Joanna, her adoption of the younger branch of the 
house of Anjou, and the counter adoption of a prince 
of the house of Arragon by queen Joanna the 


LECTURE IL 


117 


Second, the new contest between the French and 
Spanish princes, and the triumph of the latter in 
1442, fall naturally under our view, in order to ex¬ 
plain the expedition of Charles the Eighth. I say 
nothing of enquiries less closely connected with our 
main subject, enquiries suggested by the events of 
the Italian expedition; the state of Florence after 
the unsubstantial lustre of Lorenzo di Medici’s 
government had passed away; the state of the pa¬ 
pacy when Alexander the Sixth could be elected to 
fill the papal chair. But in the more direct enquiries 
needed to illustrate the contest in Naples itself, we 
see how wide a field must be explored of earlier 
times, in order to understand the passing events of 
modern history. 

The Memoirs of Philip de Comines terminate 
about twenty years before the reformation, six years 
after the first voyage of Columbus. They relate 
then to a tranquil period immediately preceding a 
period of extraordinary movement; to the last stage 
of an old state of things, now on the point of passing 
away. Such periods, the lull before the burst of 
the hurricane, the almost oppressive stillness which 
announces the eruption, or to use Campbell’s beautiful 
image,— 

“ The torrent’s smoothness ere it dash below,” 

are always, I think, full of a very deep interest. But 
it is not from the mere force of contrast with the 
times that follow, nor yet from the solemnity which 
all things wear when their dissolution is fast ap- 


118 


LECTURE II. 


proaching,—the interest has yet another source; our 
knowledge namely, that in that tranquil period lay 
the germs of the great changes following, taking 
their shape for good or for evil, and sometimes irre¬ 
versibly, while all wore an outside of unconscious¬ 
ness. We, enlightened by experience, are impatient 
of this deadly slumber, we wish in vain that the age 
could have been awakened to a sense of its condition, 
and taught the infinite preciousness of the passing 
hour. And as when a man has been cut off by 
sudden death, we are curious to know whether his 
previous words or behaviour indicated any sense of 
his coming fate, so we examine the records of a state 
of things just expiring, anxious to observe whether in 
any point there may be discerned an anticipation of 

the great future, or whether all was blindness and 

• 

insensibility. In this respect Coniines’ Memoirs are 
striking from their perfect unconsciousness : the knell 
of the middle ages had been already sounded, yet 
Comines has no other-notions than such as they had 
tended to foster; he describes their events, their 
characters, their relations, as if they were to continue 
for centuries. His remarks are such as the simplest 
form of human affairs gives birth to; he laments the 
instability of earthly fortune, as Homer notes our 
common mortality, or in the tone of that beautiful 
dialogue between Solon and Croesus, when the phi¬ 
losopher assured the king that to be rich was not 
necessarily to be happy. But resembling' Herodotus 
in his simple morality, he is utterly unlike him in 
another point; for whilst Herodotus speaks freely 


LECTURE II. 


119 


and honestly of all men without respect of persons, 
Philip de Comines praises his master Louis the 
Eleventh as one of the best of princes, although he 
witnessed not only the crimes of his life, but the 
miserable fears and suspicions of his latter end, and 
has even faithfully recorded them. In this respect 
Philip de Comines is in no respect superior to Frois¬ 
sart, with whom the crimes committed by his 
knights and great lords never interfere with his 
general eulogies of them : the habit of deference and 
respect was too strong to be broken, and the facts 
which he himself relates to their discredit, appear to 
have produced on his mind no impression. 

It is not then in Philip de Comines, nor in the 
other historians of the earlier period of modern his¬ 
tory, that we find the greatest historical questions 
presenting themselves. If we attempt to ascend to 
these, we must seek them by ourselves; the his¬ 
torians themselves do not naturally lead us to them. 
But we must now proceed to the second or more 
complicated period, and we must see to what kind of 
enquiries the histories of this period immediately in¬ 
troduce us, and what is necessary to enable us fully 
to understand the scenes which they present to 
us. And on this subject I hope to enter in my next 
lecture. 













. 












































LECTURE III. 


It is my hope, if I am allowed to resume these 
lectures next year, to enter fully into the history of 
some one characteristic period of the middle ages, to 
point out as well as I can the sources of information 
respecting it, and to paint it, and enable you to judge 
of its nature both absolutely and relatively to us. 
But for the present, I must turn to that period which 
is properly to be called modern history, the modern 
of the modern, the complicated period as I have 
called it, in contradistinction to the simpler period 
which preceded it. And here too, if life and health 
be spared me, I hope hereafter to enter into minute 
details; selecting some one country as the principal 
subject of our enquiries, and illustrating the lessons 
of history for the most part from its particular ex¬ 
perience. Now, however, I must content myself 
with more general notices: I must remember that I 
am endeavouring to assist the student of modern 
history, by suggesting to him the best method of 


122 


LECTURE III. 


studying it, and pointing out the principal difficulties 
which will impede his progress. I must not suppose 
the student to be working only at the history of one 
country, or one age: the points of interest in the 
three last centuries are so numerous that our re¬ 
searches may be carried on far apart from each other, 
and I must endeavour, so far as my knowledge will 
permit, to render these lectures serviceable gene¬ 
rally. 

Now in the first place, when we enter upon modern 
history, our work, limit it as we will, unavoidably 
grows in magnitude. Allowing that we are not so 
extravagant as to aim at mastering the details of the 
history of the whole world, that we set aside oriental 
history and colonial history; that farther, having now 
restricted ourselves to Europe, we separate the 
western kingdoms from the northern and eastern, and 
confine our attention principally to our own country 
and to those which have been most closely con¬ 
nected with it; yet still the limit which we strive to 
draw round our enquiries will be continually broken 
through, they will and must extend themselves 
beyond it. Northern, eastern, and south-eastern 
Europe, the vast world of European colonies, nay 
sometimes the distinct oriental world itself, will 
demand our attention : there is scarcely a portion of 
the globe of which we can be suffered to remain in 
complete ignorance. Amidst this wide field, widen¬ 
ing as it were before us at every step, it becomes 
doubly important to gain certain principles of enquiry. 


LECTURE III. 


123 


lest we should be wandering about vaguely like an 
ignorant man in an ill-arranged museum, seeing and 
wondering at much, but learning nothing. 

The immense variety of history makes it very 
possible for different persons to study it with dif¬ 
ferent objects; and here we have an obvious and 
convenient division. But the great object, as I 
cannot but think, is that which most nearly touches 
the inner life of civilized man, namely, the vicissi¬ 
tudes of institutions, social, political, and religious. 
This, in my judgment, is the reXetorarov re\o$ of his¬ 
torical enquiry; but because of its great and crown¬ 
ing magnitude we will assign to it its due place of 
honour, we will survey the exterior and the outer 
courts of the temple, before we approach the 
sanctuary. 

In history, as in other things, a knowledge of the 
external is needed before we arrive at that which is 
within. We want to get a sort of frame for our 
picture; a set of local habitations, roVot, where our 
ideas may be arranged, a scene in which the struggle 
of principles is to be fought, and men who are to 
fight it. And thus we want to know clearly the 
geographical bounds of different countries, and their 
external revolutions. This leads us in the first 
instance to geography and military history, even if 
our ultimate object lies beyond. But being led to 
them by necessity we linger in them afterwards from 
choice; so much is there in both of the most 
picturesque and poetical character, so much of 


124 


LECTURE III. 


beauty, of magnificence, and of interest, physical and 
moral. 

The student of modern history especially needs a 
knowledge of geography, because, as I have said, his 
enquiries will lead him first or last to every quarter 
of the globe. But let us consider a little what a 
knowledge of geography is. First, I grant, it is a 
knowledge of the relative position and distance of 
places from one another: and by places I mean 
either towns, or the habitations of particular tribes 
or nations; for I think our first notion of a map is 
that of a plan of the dwellings of the human race; 
we connect it strictly with man, and with man’s his¬ 
tory. And here I believe many persons’ geography 
stops: they have an idea of the shape, relative 
position and distance of different countries; and of 
the position, that is as respects the points of the 
compass, and mutual distance, of the principal towns. 
Every one for example has a notion of the shapes of 
France and of Italy, that one is situated north-west 
of the other, and that their frontiers join : and again, 
every one knows that Paris is situated in the north 
of France, Bordeaux in the south-west; that Venice 
lies at the north-east corner of Italy, and Rome 
nearly in the middle as regards north and south, and 
near to the western sea. Thus much of knowledge 
is indeed indispensable to the simplest understanding 
of history; and this kind of knowledge, extending 
over more or less countries as it may be, and em¬ 
bracing with more or less minuteness the divisions of 


LECTURE III. 


125 


provinces, and the position of the smaller towns, is 
that which passes, I believe, with many for a know¬ 
ledge of geography. 

Yet you will observe, that this knowledge does 
not touch the earth itself, but only the dwellings of 
men upon the earth. It regards the shapes of a 
certain number of great national estates, if I may so 
call them; the limits of which, like those of in¬ 
dividuals’ property, have often respect to no natural 
boundaries but are purely arbitrary. A real know¬ 
ledge of geography embraces at once a knowledge of 
the earth, and of the dwellings of man upon it; it 
stretches out one hand to history, and the other 
to geology and physiology; it is just that part in the 
dominion of knowledge where the students of physical 
and of moral science meet together. 

And without denying the usefulness of that plan¬ 
like knowledge of geography of which I was just 
now speaking, it cannot be doubted that a far deeper 
knowledge of it is required by him who would study 
history effectively. And the deeper knowledge 
becomes far the easier to remember. For my own 
part 1 find it extremely difficult to remember the 
position of towns, when I have no other association 
with them than their situation relatively to each 
other. But let me once understand the real 
geography of a country, its organic structure if I 
may so call it: the form of its skeleton, that is, of 
its hills: the magnitude and course of its veins and 
arteries, that is, of its streams and rivers : let me 
conceive of it as of a whole made up of connected 


120 


LECTURE III. 


parts; and then the position of man’s dwellings, 
viewed in reference to these parts, becomes at once 
easily remembered, and lively and intelligible be¬ 
sides. 

I said that geography held out one hand to geology 
and physiology, while she held out the other to 
history. In fact geology and physiology themselves 
are closely connected with history. For instance, 
what lies at the bottom of that question which is 
now being discussed everywhere, the question of the 
corn laws, but the geological fact that England is 
more richly supplied with coal mines a than any other 

a The importance of our coal mines is so great, that I think it 
a duty to reprint here a note of Dr. Buckland’s, which is to he 
found in p. 41 of his “ Address delivered at the Anniversary 
Meeting of the Geological Society of London, 19th February, 
1841.” What Dr. Buckland says on sucli a subject is of the 
very highest authority; and should be circulated as widely as 
possible. 

“ As no more coal is in process of formation, and our national 
prosperity must inevitably terminate with the exhaustion of those 
precious stores of mineral fuel, which form the foundation of our 
greatest manufacturing and commercial establishments, I feel it 
my duty to entreat the attention of the legislature to two evil 
practices which are tending to accelerate the period when the con¬ 
tents of our coal mines will have been consumed. The first of 
these is the wanton waste which for more than fifty years has been 
committed by the coal-owners near Newcastle, by screening and 
burning annually in never-extinguished fiery heaps at the pits’ 
mouth, more than one million of chaldrons of excellent small coal, 
being nearly one third of the entire produce of the best coal-mines 
in England. This criminal destruction of the elements of our 
national industry, which is accelerating by one third the not very 
distant period when these mines will be exhausted, is perpetrated 


LECTURE ITT. 


127 


country in the world ? What has given a peculiar 
interest to our relations with China, but the physio¬ 
logical fact, that the tea plant, which is become so 
necessary to our daily life, has been cultivated with 
equal success in no other climate or country ? What 
is it which threatens the permanence of the union 
between the northern and southern states of the 
American confederacy, but the physiological fact 
that the soil and climate of the southern states 
render them essentially agricultural; while those of 
the northern states, combined with their geographical 
advantages as to sea-ports, dispose them no less 
naturally to be manufacturing and commercial ? 
The whole character of a nation may be influenced 
by its geology and physical geography. 

But for the sake of its mere beauty and liveliness, if 
there were no other consideration, it would be worth 
our while to acquire this richer view of geography. 
Conceive only the difference between a ground plan 
and a picture. The mere plan-geography of Italy 

by the colliers, for the purpose of selling the remaining two thirds 
at a greater profit than they would derive from the sale of the 
entire bulk unscreened to the coal-merchant. 

“ The second evil is the exportation of coal to foreign countries, 
in some of which it is employed to work the machinery of rival 
manufactories, that in certain cases could scarcely be maintained 
without a supply of British coals. In 1839, 1,431,861 tons 
were exported, and in 1840, 1,592,283 tons, of which nearly 
one fourth were sent to France. An increased duty on coals ex¬ 
ported to any country, excepting our own colonies, might afford a 
remedy. See note on this subject in my Bridgewater Treatise, 
vol. i. p. 535.” 


128 


LECTURE III. 


gives us its shape, as I have observed, and the 
position of its towns; to these it may add a semi¬ 
circle of mountains round the northern boundary, to 
represent the Alps ; and another long line stretching 
down the middle of the country to represent the 
Apennines. But let us carry on this a little farther, 
and give life and meaning and harmony to what is at 
present at once lifeless and confused. Observe in the 
first place, how the Apennine line, beginning from the 
southern extremity of the Alps, runs across Italy to 
the very edge of the Adriatic, and thus separates 
naturally the Italy proper of the Romans from 
Cisalpine Gaul. Observe again, how the Alps, after 
running north and south where they divide Italy 
from France, turn then away to the eastward, running 
almost parallel to the Apennines, till they too touch 
the head of the Adriatic, on the confines of Istria. 
Thus between these two lines of mountains there is 
enclosed one great basin or plain; enclosed on three 
sides by mountains, open only on the east to the sea. 
Observe how widely it spreads itself out, and then 
see how well it is watered. One great river flows 
through it in its whole extent; and this is fed by 
streams almost unnumbered, descending towards it 
on either side, from the Alps on one side, and from 
the Apennines on the other. Who can wonder that 
this large and rich and well-watered plain should be 
filled with flourishing cities, or that it should have 
been contended for so often by successive invaders ? 
Then descending into Italy proper, we find the com¬ 
plexity of its geography quite in accordance with its 


LECTURE III. 


129 

manifold political divisions. It is not one simple 
central ridge ot mountains, leaving a broad belt of 
level country on either side between it and the sea; 
nor yet is it a chain rising immediately from the sea 
on one side, like the Andes in South America, and 
leaving room therefore on the other side for wide 
plains of table land, and for rivers with a sufficient 
length of course to become at last great and navi¬ 
gable. It is a back-bone thickly set with spines of 
unequal length, some of them running out at regular 
distances parallel to each other, but others twisted 
so strangely that they often run for a long way 
parallel to the back-bone, or main ridge, and interlace 
with one another in a maze almost inextricable. 
And as if to complete the disorder, in those spots 
where the spines of the Apennines, being twisted 
round, run parallel to the sea and to their own central 
chain, and thus leave an interval of plain between 
their bases and the Mediterranean, volcanic agency 
has broken up the space thus left with other and 
distinct groups of hills of its own creation, as in the 
case of Vesuvius and of the Alban hills near Rome. 
Speaking generally then, Italy is made up of an in¬ 
finite multitude of valleys pent in between high and 
steep hills, each forming a country to itself, and cut 
off by natural barriers from the others. Its several 
parts are isolated by nature, and no art of man can 
thoroughly unite them. Even the various provinces 
of the same kingdom are strangers to each other; 
the Abruzzi are like an unknown world to the in¬ 
habitants of Naples, insomuch that when two Nea- 


K 


130 


LECTURE III. 


politan naturalists not ten years since made an ex¬ 
cursion to visit the Majella, one of the highest of the 
central Apennines, they found there many medicinal 
plants growing in the greatest profusion, which the 
Neapolitans were regularly in the habit of importing 
from other countries, as no one suspected their ex¬ 
istence within their own kingdom. Hence arises the 
romantic character of Italian scenery: the constant 
combination of a mountain outline, and all the wild 
features of a mountain country, with the rich vegeta¬ 
tion of a southern climate in the valleys : hence too 
the rudeness, the pastoral simplicity, and the 
occasional robber habits, to be found in the popula¬ 
tion ; so that to this day you may travel in many 
places for miles together in the plains and valleys 
without passing through a single town or village : for 
the towns still cluster on the mountain sides, the 
houses nestling together on some scanty ledge, with 
cliffs rising above them and sinking down abruptly 
below them, the very “ congesta manu prseruptis 
oppida saxis ” of Virgil’s description, which he even 
then called “ antique walls,” because they had been 
the strongholds of the primeval inhabitants of the 
country, and which are still inhabited after a lapse of 
so many centuries, nothing of the stir and movement 
of other parts of Europe having penetrated into 
these lonely valleys, and tempted the people to quit 
their mountain fastnesses for a more accessible 
dwelling in the plain. 

I have been led on farther than I intended; but I 
wished to give an example of what I meant by a real 


LECTURE III. 


131 


and lively knowledge of geography, which brings the 
whole character of a country before our eyes, and 
enables us to understand its influence upon the social 
and political condition of its inhabitants. And this 
knowledge, as I said before, is very important to 
enable us to follow clearly the external revolutions 
of different nations, which we want to comprehend 
before we penetrate to what has been passing 
within. 

The undoubted tendency of the last three cen¬ 
turies has been to consolidate what were once sepa¬ 
rate states or kingdoms into one great nation. The 
Spanish peninsula, which in earlier times had con¬ 
tained many distinct states, came to consist as at 
present of two kingdoms only, Spain and Portugal, 
in the last ten years of the fifteenth century. France 
about the same period acquired Bretagne and Pro¬ 
vence, but its acquisitions of Artois, of Franche 
Comte, of French Flanders, of Lorraine and of Al¬ 
sace, have been much later; and Avignon and its 
territory were not acquired till the revolution. For 
a century after the beginning of our period, Scotland 
and England were governed by different sovereigns; 
for two centuries they remained distinct kingdoms; 
and the legislative union with Ireland is no older 
than the present century. Looking eastward, how 
many kingdoms and states have been swallowed up in 
the empire of Austria: Bohemia, and Hungary: the 
duchies of Milan and Mantua, and the republic of 
Venice. The growth of Prussia into a mighty king¬ 
dom, and Russia into the most colossal of empires, is 

K 2 


132 


LECTURE III. 


the work of the last century or of the present. Even 
in Germany and Italy, where smaller states still sub¬ 
sist, the same law has been in operation; of all the 
free imperial cities of Germany four only are left, 
Frankfort, Hamburg, Bremen, and Lubec; and not 
Prussia only but Bavaria has grown into a great 
kingdom. So it has been in Italy; Venice and 
Genoa have both been absorbed in our own days into 
the monarchies of Austria and Sardinia; but the six¬ 
teenth century, and even the fifteenth had begun 
this work’: Venice had extinguished the independ¬ 
ence of Padua and Verona ; Florence had conquered 
its rival Pisa: and at a later period the duchies of 
Ferrara and Urbino fell under the dominion of the 
popes. This then has been the tendency of things 
generally; but it has been a tendency by no means 
working unchecked ; on the contrary, wherever it has 
threatened to lead to the universal or overbearing 
dominion of a single state, it has been strenuously 
resisted, and resisted with success; as in the case of 
Austria and Spain in the sixteenth and early part of 
the seventeenth centuries, of France at the end of 
the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth; of 
England in some degree after the peace of Paris in 
1763, and again of France in our own times. These 
successive excesses of the tendency towards consoli¬ 
dation, and the resistance offered to them, afford 
some of the most convenient divisions for the ex¬ 
ternal history of modern Europe, and as such I will 
briefly notice them. 

We have seen that at the end of the fifteenth cen- 


LECTURE HI. 


133 


tury, France and Spain had already become greatly 
consolidated within themselves; the former by the 
acquisition of the duchy of Burgundy, of Provence, 
and above all of Bretagne ; the latter by the union of 
the kingdoms of Castile and Leon, and the destruction 
of the Moorish kingdom of Granada. But after the 
marriage of the heiress of Burgundy to Maximilian 
archduke of Austria had united the Netherlands and 
Franche Comte to the Austrian dominions, the sub¬ 
sequent marriage of the archduke Philip, Maximi¬ 
lian’s son, with Joanna daughter and heiress of Fer¬ 
dinand and Isabella, added to them besides in the 
beginning of the sixteenth century the whole inherit¬ 
ance of the crown of Spain. And as the kingdom 
of Naples had finally fallen into the hands of Ferdi¬ 
nand of Arragon, at the termination of the long 
struggle between the Arragoneze line and that of 
Anjou, Naples also was included in this inheritance. 
So that when Charles the Fifth, the archduke Philip’s 
son, succeeded his grandfather Maximilian as emperor, 
in 1519, the mass of his dominions seemed to put 
him in the way of acquiring an universal empire. 
And this Austro-Spanish power is the first of those 
which going beyond the just limits of the law of con¬ 
solidation of states, threatened to alter altogether the 
condition of Europe. 

It was opposed principally by France, kept at bay 
by Francis the First throughout his reign, notwith¬ 
standing the defeats which he suffered; humbled by 
the successful alliance of his successor Henry the 
Second with the German Protestants in 1551, and 


134 


LECTURE III. 


finally dissolved by the abdication of Charles the 
Fifth, and the consequent division of his empire, his 
brother Ferdinand succeeding to his German do¬ 
minions, whilst his son Philip inherited Spain, Naples, 
and the Netherlands. This took place in 1555, the 
second year of the reign of our queen Mary. 

But though deprived of his father’s German do¬ 
minions, yet the inheritance of Philip the Second was 
still so ample that the Spanish power itself over¬ 
stepped its just bounds, and became a new object of 
alarm to Europe. The conquest of Portugal after 
the death of king Sebastian in Africa had given to 
Philip the whole Spanish peninsula; to this were 
added the Spanish discoveries and conquests in Ame¬ 
rica, with the wealth derived from them ; besides the 
kingdom of Naples, including the islands of Sardinia 
and Sicily, and the seventeen provinces of the 
Netherlands. There was this important circum¬ 
stance in addition, that France, which had successfully 
resisted Charles the Fifth, was now distracted by its 
own religious wars, and in no condition to uphold the 
balance of power abroad. The dominion of Philip 
the Second was therefore a very reasonable cause of 
alarm. 

But this too was resisted and dissolved; princi¬ 
pally owing to the revolt of the Netherlands, the op¬ 
position of England, and the return of France to her 
proper place amongst European powers, when her 
religious wars were ended by Henry the Fourth. 
Philip lived to see the decline of his power, and the 
dismemberment of his empire was sanctioned by his 


LECTURE III. 


135 


successor Philip the Third, who virtually resigned his 
claim to the sovereignty of the seven united provinces 
of the Netherlands, the newly formed republic of Hol¬ 
land. This great concession, expressed under the form 
of a truce for twelve years, was made in the year 1609, 
the sixth year of the reign of our James the First. 

During the reign of Philip the Second, Austria had 
stood aloof from Spain; but in the reigns of his suc¬ 
cessors the two branches of the Austrian line were 
drawn more closely together, and their power was 
exerted for the same object. The conquest of the 
Palatinate by the emperor Ferdinand the Second, in 
1622, again excited general alarm, and resistance 
was organized once more against the dangerous 
power of the house of Austria. France, under 
Richelieu, was once more the principal bond of the 
union, but the power which acted the most promi¬ 
nent part w r as one which had not hitherto interfered 
in the general affairs of Europe, the northern king¬ 
dom of Sweden. Sweden, Holland, and the protest- 
ant states of Germany, were leagued against the 
house of Austria under its two heads, the emperor 
and the king of Spain. Again the resisting power 
triumphed; the Austrian power in Germany was ef¬ 
fectually restrained by the peace of Westphalia, in 
1648; Spain saw Portugal again become an inde¬ 
pendent kingdom, and when she ended her quarrel 
with France by the peace of the Pyrenees in 1659, 
she retired for ever from the foremost place amongst 
the powers of Europe. 

Austria thus curbed, and Spain falling into decline, 


136 


LECTURE III. 


room was left for others to succeed to the highest 
place in Europe, now left vacant, and that place was 
immediately occupied by France. Louis the Four¬ 
teenth, Henry the Fourth’s grandson, began to reign 
without governors in the year 1661, the year after 
our restoration, and for the next twenty or thirty 
years the French power became more and more for¬ 
midable. Its conquests indeed were not considerable, 
when compared with those of a later period, yet 
were they in themselves of great and enduring im¬ 
portance. French Flanders gave to France the 
fortress of Lisle and the port of Dunkirk. Franche 
Comte extended its frontier to the eastern slope of 
the Jura, and the borders of Switzerland ; Alsace 
carried it over the crest of the Vosges, and esta¬ 
blished it on the Rhine. But the power of France 
was not to be judged of merely by its territorial 
conquests. Its navy had arisen from nothing to the 
sovereignty of the seas; its internal resources were 
developed, the ascendancy of its arts, its fashions, 
and its literature, was universal. Yet this fourth 
alarm of universal dominion passed away like those 
which had preceded it. And here the resisting 
power was England, which now for the first time 
since the reign of Elizabeth, took an active part in 
the affairs of Europe. This change was effected by 
the accession of William the Third, the stadtliolder 
of Holland and the great antagonist of Louis the 
Fourteenth, to the throne of England; and by the 
strong national, and religious, and political feeling 
against France which possessed the English people. 


LECTURE III. 


137 


William checked the power of Louis the Fourteenth, 
Marlborough and Eugene overthrew it. Oppressed 
by defeats abroad, and by famine and misery at home, 
Louis was laid at the mercy of his enemies, and was 
only saved by a party revolution in the English 
ministry. But the peace of Utrecht in 1713, 
although it sanctioned the succession of the French 
prince Philip, grandson of king Louis, to the throne 
of Spain, yet by its other stipulations, and still more 
by the weakness which made France accept it, 
shewed sufficiently that all danger of French 
dominion was effectually overpast. 

Then followed a period of nearly ninety years, 
during which the external order of Europe was not 
materially threatened. Had Frederic the Second of 
Prussia possessed greater physical resources, his per¬ 
sonal qualities and dispositions might have made him 
the most formidable of conquerors; but as it was, 
his extraordinary efforts were essentially defensive; 
it was his glory at the end of the Seven Years’ War 
that Prussia was not overwhelmed, that it had 
shattered the mighty confederacy which had assailed 
it, and that having ridden out the storm, the fiery 
trial left it with confirmed and proved strength, and 
protected besides by the shield of its glory. England 
alone, by her great colonial and naval successes in 
the war of 1755, and by the high pretensions of her 
naval code, excited during this period the jealousy of 
Europe; and thus not only France and Spain, but 
her old ally Holland, took part against her in the 
American war, and the northern powers shewed that 


138 


LECTURE III. 


tlieir disposition was equally unfriendly, by agreeing 
together in tlieir armed neutrality. But in the loss 
of America, England seemed to have paid a sufficient 
penalty, and the spirit of jealousy and hostility against 
her did not appear to survive the conclusion of the 
peace of Paris in 1783. 

Ten years afterwards there broke out by far the 
most alarming danger of universal dominion, which 
had ever threatened Europe. The most military 
people in Europe became engaged in a war for their 
very existence. Invasion on the frontiers, civil war 
and all imaginable horrors raging within, the ordinary 
relations of life went to wrack, and every Frenchman 
became a soldier. It was a multitude numerous as 
the hosts of Persia, but animated by the courage and 
skill and energy of the old Romans. One thing 

alone was wanting, that which Pyrrhus said the 

% 

Romans wanted, to enable them to conquer the 
world, a general and a ruler like himself. There 
was wanted a master hand to restore and maintain 
peace at home, and to concentrate and direct the 
immense military resources of France against her 
foreign enemies. And such an one appeared in 
Napoleon. Pacifying La Vendee, receiving back the 
emigrants, restoring the church, remodelling the law, 
personally absolute, yet carefully preserving and 
maintaining all the great points which the nation 
had won at the revolution, Napoleon united in him¬ 
self not only the power but the whole will of France, 
and that power and will were guided by a genius for 
war such as Europe had never seen since Caesar. 


LECTURE III. 


139 


The effect was absolutely magical. In November 
1799 he was made First Consul; he found France 
humbled by defeats, his Italian conquests lost, his 
allies invaded, his own frontier threatened. He took 
the field in May 1800, and in June the whole 
fortune of the war was changed, and Austria driven 
out of Lombardy by the victory of Marengo. Still 
the flood of the tide rose higher and higher, and 
every successive wave of its advance swept away a 
kingdom. Earthly state has never reached a prouder 
pinnacle, than when Napoleon in June 1812 gathered 
his army at Dresden, that mighty host, unequalled in 
all time, of 450,000, not men merely but effective 
soldiers, and there received the homage of subject 
kings. And now what was the principal adversary 
of this tremendous power? by whom was it checked, 
and resisted, and put down ? By none, and by nothing, 
but the direct and manifest interposition of God. I 
know of no language so well fitted to describe that 
victorious advance to Moscow, and the utter humilia¬ 
tion of the retreat, as the language of the prophet with 
respect to the advance and subsequent destruction 
of the host of Sennacherib. “ When they arose early 
in the morning, behold they were all dead corpses,” 
applies almost literally to that memorable night of 
frost in which twenty thousand horses perished, and 
the strength of the French army was utterly broken. 
Human instruments no doubt were employed in the 
remainder of the work, nor would I deny to Germany 
and to Prussia the glories of that great year 1813, 


140 


LECTURE III. 


nor to England the honour of her victories in Spain, 
or of the crowning victory of Waterloo. But at the 
distance of thirty years, those who lived in the time 
of danger, and remember its magnitude, and now 
calmly review what there was in human strength to 
avert it, must acknowledge, I think, beyond all con¬ 
troversy, that the deliverance of Europe from the 
dominion of Napoleon was effected neither by Russia, 
nor by Germany, nor by England, but by the hand of 
God alone. 

What I have now been noticing will afford one 
division which may be convenient for the student of 
modern history; one division, out of many which 
might be made, and purely an external one. But 
for this purpose it may be useful, just as we some¬ 
times divide Grecian History into the periods of the 
Lacedaemonian, the Athenian, the Theban, and the 
Macedonian ascendancy. It shews us how the centre 
of external movement has varied, round what point 
the hopes and fears of Europe have been successively 
busy, so far as concerns external dominion. You 
will observe, however, how strictly I have confined 
myself to the outward and merely territorial struggle; 
how entirely I have omitted all those other and 
deeper points which are in connexion with the 
principles of internal life. I have regarded Aus¬ 
tria, Spain, and France purely in one and the same 
light; that is, as national bodies occupying a certain 
space on the map of Europe, and endeavouring to 
spread themselves beyond this space, and so deranging 


LECTURE ITT. 


141 


the position of those other national bodies which ex¬ 
isted in their neighbourhood. You know that this 
is a very imperfect representation of the great con¬ 
tests of Europe. You know that Austria and Spain 
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were not 
merely two nations governed by the same sovereign 
or by sovereigns closely allied together, and which 
sought tlieir own aggrandizement at the expense of 
their neighbours. They were a great deal more 
than this; they were the representatives, not purely 
but in a great measure, of certain political and reli¬ 
gious principles; and the triumph of these principles 
was involved in their territorial conquests. So again, 
the resistance to them was in part also the resistance 
of the opposite principles ; in part, but by no means 
purely. It is worth our while to observe this, as 
one instance out of thousands, how little any real 
history is an exact exemplification of abstract prin¬ 
ciples ; how our generalizations,—which must indeed 
be made, for so alone can history furnish us with any 
truths,—must yet be kept within certain limits, or 
they become full of error. Thus, for instance, it is 
quite true to say that the struggle against Austria 
and Spain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries 
was not a mere resistance against territorial aggres¬ 
sion : there were principles involved in the contest. 
Yet all concerned in this resistance did not feel it to 
be a contest of principle: France under Francis the 
First and Henry the Second, and again under Henry 
the Fourth, and lastly under Louis the Thirteenth, or 
rather under Richelieu, was most deeply engaged in 


142 


LECTURE III. 


tlie resistance to Austria and Spain; yet certainly 
the French government at no one time was contend¬ 
ing either for Christian truth or for civil freedom. 
With France it was a purely territorial and external 
contest; and this was well shewn by the conduct of 
Francis the First, who burnt French protestants at 
Paris, while he was allying himself with the protest¬ 
ants of Germany; who opposed, accidentally indeed, 
the papal power and cause, but who did not scruple 
to form a league with the Turks. So again, in the 
Thirty Years’ War, that very Richelieu who mainly 
contributed to the establishment of protestantism in 
Germany on a perfectly equal footing by the treaty 
of Westphalia, was the very man who threw his 
mole across the harbour of Rochelle, and conquered 
the great stronghold of protestantism in France. 

These external movements, then, as we have now 
been contemplating them, involve no questions of 
political or religious principle. We may conceive of 
them as of a mere game of chess, where the pieces 
and pawns on both sides differ from each other only 
in being played from a different part of the board. 
What we have to consider in these contests are 
mostly economical questions and military: the purse 
and the sword were the powers which decided them. 
But is the study of such questions indifferent to us ? 
That surely it were most unwise to imagine. For in 
the first place, these very contests which we are now 
regarding as purely external, were really as we have 
seen contests of principle also; and thus the eco¬ 
nomical and military skill which determined their 


LECTURE III. 


143 


issue, were in fact the means by which certain prin¬ 
ciples were attacked or defended. Besides, economy 
and military virtues are the great supports of national 
existence, as food and exercise support our individual 
bodies. I grant that the existence so supported may 
be worthless, may be sinful: yet self-preservation is 
an essential condition of all virtue; in order to do 
their duty both states and individuals must first live 
and be kept alive. But more than all this, econo¬ 
mical and military questions are not purely external; 
they are connected closely with moral good and evil; 
a faulty political economy is the fruitful parent of 
crime; a sound military system is no mean school of 
virtue; and war, as I have said before, has in its vi¬ 
cissitudes, and much more in the moral qualities 
which it calls into action, a deep and abiding inter¬ 
est for every one worthy of the name of man. 

Economical questions arise obviously out of the 
history of all wars, although careless readers are very 
apt to neglect them. They arise out of that simple 
law of our nature which makes it necessary for every 
man to eat and drink and be clothed. Common 
readers, and I am afraid I may add, many historians 
also, appear to write and read about military opera¬ 
tions without recollecting this. We hear of armies 
marching, advancing and retreating, besieging towns, 
fighting battles, being engaged actively for some 
weeks or months, and are apt to think of them solely 
as moving or fighting machines, whose success de¬ 
pends on the skill with which their general plays 
them, as if they were really so many chess-men. Yet 


144 


LECTURE III. 


one would think it was sufficiently obvious that these 
armies are made up of men who must eat and drink 
every day, and who wear clothing. Of the expense 
and difficulty of maintaining them it is not easy, I 
grant, for private persons in peace to form any ade- 
quate idea. Yet here we may gain something more 
of a notion of it than can be obtained readily in a 
private family. A college will contain perhaps 
seventy or eighty members; let any man but look 
round the hall at dinner; or let him go into the 
kitchen and see the number of joints at the fire, or 
let him ask the number of pounds of meat required for 
the daily consumption of the college, and see what the 
cost will amount to. Then he may think what it is to 
provide for the food not of eighty or of ninety persons, 
but of twenty, or of forty, or of sixty, or even of a 
hundred thousand. All this multitude doing nothing 
to raise food or make clothing for themselves, must 
be fed and clothed out of the wealth of the commu¬ 
nity. Again this community may have to maintain not 
one of these armies but several, and large fleets be¬ 
sides, and this for many years together; while it may 
often happen that its means of doing so are at the 
same time crippled: its foreign trade may be cut off, 
or large portions of its territory may be laid waste; 
while the event of the contest being uncertain, and 
defeat and ruin being a possible consequence of it, 
hope and confidence are checked, and with them 
credit perishes also. Is it then a light matter first 
to provide the necessary resources for such a contest, 
and next to see that they are not spent wastefully ? 


LECTURE nr. 


145 


With regard to providing them, there is first the 
great question between direct taxation and loans. 
Shall we lay the whole burden of the contest upon 
the present generation, or divide it between ourselves 
and posterity ? Conceive now the difficulties, the 
exceeding temptations, which beset the decision of 
this question. In a free government it may be 
doubtful whether the people will consent to raise the 
money or no. But suppose that legally they have no 
voice in the matter, that the government may lay on 
what taxes it will; still extreme discontent at home 
is not likely to be risked in the midst of foreign war; 
or if the people are willing to bear the burden still 
the power may be wanting. A tax may easily de¬ 
stroy itself: that is, suppose that a man’s trade just 
yields him a profit which he can live upon, and a tax 
is laid upon him to the amount of a fourth part of 
his profit. If he raises the price of his commodity 
to the consumer, the consumer will either purchase 
so much the less of it, or will endeavour to procure 
it from other countries where the dealer being less 
heavily taxed can afford to sell on cheaper terms. 
Then the government interposes to protect the taxed 
native dealer by prohibiting the importation of the 
commodity of the untaxed foreigner. But such a 
prohibition running counter to a plain rule of com¬ 
mon sense, which makes every man desire to buy a 
cheaper article rather than a dearer, when both are 
of equal goodness, it can only be maintained by foice. 
Thence arises the necessity of a large constabulaiy 01 
preventive force to put down smuggling, and, to say 


146 


LECTURE III. 


nothing of the moral evils produced by such a state 
of things, it is clear that the expense of the additional 
preventive force which the new tax rendered neces¬ 
sary, is all to be deducted from the profits of that tax ; 
.and this deduction, added to the falling off in its pro¬ 
ductiveness occasioned by the greater poverty of the 
tax payer, may reduce its return almost to nothing. 
Suppose then that a statesman, appalled by all these 
difficulties, resolves to share the burden with posterity, 
and begins to raise money by loans. No doubt for 
the present his work is greatly facilitated; instead of 
providing for the principal of the money which he 
wants, he has only to provide for the interest of it. ' 
But observe what follows. In the first place, by an 
almost universal law of our nature, money lightly 
gained is lightly spent: a revenue raised at the ex¬ 
pense of posterity is sure to be squandered waste- 
fully. Waste as usual begetting want, the sums 
raised by loans will commonly be large. Now these 
large sums are a mortgage on all the property, on all 
the industry, on all the skill and ability of a country 
for ever. Every acre of land from henceforth has not 
only to maintain its owner and his family, and to 
answer the just demands of the actual public service, 
but it has also to feed one or more extraneous per¬ 
sons besides, the state’s creditors or their heirs, who 
in times past lent it their money. Every man who 
would have laboured twelve hours for the support of 
his family and the public service of his own genera¬ 
tion, must labour one or two hours in addition, for 
the support of a stranger, the state’s creditor. So 


LECTURE III. 


147 


with all its property, with all its industry, with all its 
powers thus burdened, thus strained to the very ex¬ 
tremity of endurance, the nation is committed to the 
vicissitudes of all coming time, to run in the race with 
other nations who are in the full freshness of their 
unstrained strength ; to battle with occasional storms 
which would try the lightest and stoutest vessel, 
but in which one already overloaded till the timbers 
are well nigh starting, must necessarily expect to 
founder. 

Such then being the financial or economical diffi¬ 
culties besetting every great contest, it is no mean 
wisdom to avoid them as far as is possible; to make 
the people so keenly enter into the necessity of the 
contest that they will make real sacrifices to main¬ 
tain it; so to choose the subjects of taxation, and so 
to distribute its burden, as to make it press with the 
least possible severity, neither seriously impairing a 
people’s resources, nor irritating their feelings by a 
sense of its inequality. If a statesman after all finds 
that he must borrow,—and I am far from denying 
that such a necessity has sometimes existed,—it is 
no mean administrative wisdom to enforce the 
strictest economy in his expenditure; rigorously to 
put down and punish all jobbing, whether in high 
quarters or in low, but more especially in the former; 
to resist the fatal temptation of having frequent re¬ 
course to an expedient promising present ease and 
only threatening future ruin; and to keep his eye 
steadily upon the payment within a definite time of 
the sums which he is obliged to borrow. That 

l 2 


148 


LECTURE III. 


this is a most rare and high wisdom we shall learn 
from history, by seeing the fatal consequences of the 
opposite follies: consequences wide and deep and 
lasting; and affecting not only a nation’s physical 
welfare, but through it surely and. fatally corrupting 
its higher welfare also. 

One example of this sad truth may be taken from 
a foreign history; the other which I shall give af¬ 
fects us yet more closely. We know in how many 
wars France was engaged throughout the eighteenth 
century. We know that in the Seven Years’ War 
her efforts were great and her defeats overwhelming, 
while her government was in the highest degree 
wasteful and unequal in its dealings towards the dif¬ 
ferent classes of society. We know that about fifteen 
years afterwards France again engaged in our Ame¬ 
rican war, and supported a very expensive contest, 
still aggravated as before by wastefulness, corruption, 
and injustice at home, for the space of five years. A 
general embarrassment in the finances was the conse¬ 
quence, and this brought the old and inveterate evils 
of the political and social state of France to a head. 
Both together led, not to the revolution, but to those 
tremendous disorders which accompanied and fol¬ 
lowed the revolution ; disorders quite distinct from 
it, and which were owing mainly to the extremely 
unhealthy state of the social relations in France, to 
which unhealthy state wide-spreading distress, brought 
on by a most unequal and corrupt system of taxation, 
had largely contributed. 

The other, and unhappily the nearer instance, is 


LECTURE III. 


149 


yet even more significant. Whatever distress or dif¬ 
ficulty at this moment surrounds us, has its source in 
a very great degree in financial or economical causes. 
Of course I am not going to offer any opinion as to 
the present or future ; I am merely referring to what 
is an historical fact belonging to the past. It is a 
fact beyond all controversy that the wars of the last 
century, and particularly that great war which raged 
during the first fifteen years of the present century, 
were supported largely by loans; it is no less certain a 
fact that of the debt thus contracted a sum amount¬ 
ing to above £700,000,000 is still unpaid, and 
that more than half of our yearly revenue, to say 
the least, is appropriated to paying the interest of it. 
That such a burden must be too much for the re¬ 
sources or industry of any country to bear without 
injury, would seem to be a proposition absolutely 
self-evident. .Every interest in the country is subject 
to unfair disadvantages in the competition with 
foreigners; every interest being heavily taxed is 
either unable, or able only by the most extraordinary 
exertions, to sustain itself in the market of the world 
against untaxed or lightly taxed rivals. Now the 
evils being enormous, and so far as we can see per¬ 
petual, it does become an important question to ask, 
whether they were also inevitable ? that is to say, 
whether, if the same circumstances were to occur 
again, which is a matter not within our control, we 
should have no choice but to adopt the very same 
financial expedients. It may be that the sums raised, 
and nothing less, were required by the urgency of 


150 


LECTURE III. 


tlie crisis; it may be that no larger portion of them 
could have been raised by present taxation than was 

so raised actually; it may be that nothing more 

* 

could have been done to liquidate the debt when 
contracted than has been done actually. But where 
the measures adopted have been so ruinous, we must 
at least be disposed to hope that they might have 
been avoided; that here, as in so many other instances, 
the fault rests not with fortune or with outward cir¬ 
cumstances, but with human passion and human 
error. 

Such is the importance and such the interest of 
the economical questions which arise out of the his¬ 
tory of the great external contests of modem Europe. 
The military questions connected with the same his¬ 
tory, will form our next subject of enquiry; and on 
this I propose to enter in my next lecture. 


LECTURE IV. 


At the very beginning of this lecture I must myself 
remind you, lest it should occur to your own minds 
if I were to omit it, of that well-known story of the 
Greek sophist wdio discoursed at length upon the art 
of war, when Hannibal happened to be amongst his 
audience. Some of his hearers, full of admiration 
of his eloquence and knowledge, for such it seemed 
to them, eagerly applied to the great general for his 
judgment, not doubting that it would confirm their 
own. But Hannibal’s answer was, that he had met 
with many absurd old men in his life, but never with 
one so absurd as this lecturer. The recollection of 
this story should ever be present to unmilitary men, 
when they attempt to speak about war; and though 
there may be no Hannibal actually present amongst 
us, yet I would wish to speak as cautiously as if my 
words were to be heard by one as competent to judge 
them as he was. 

But although the story relates to the art of war 
only, yet it is in fact universally applicable. The 


152 


LECTURE IV. 


unprofessional man, must speak with hesi¬ 

tation in presence of a master of his craft. And not 
only in his presence, but generally, he who is a 
stranger to any profession must be aware of his own 
disadvantages when speaking of the subject of that 
profession. Yet consider, on the other hand, that no 
one man in the common course of things has more 
than one profession ; is he then to be silent, or to 
feel himself incapable of passing a judgment upon 
the subjects of all professions except that one ? And 
consider farther, that professional men may labour 
under some disadvantages of their own, looking at 
their calling from within always, and never from 
without; and from their very devotion to it, not 
being apt to see it in its relations with other matters. 
Farther still, the writer of history seems under the 
necessity of overstepping this professional barrier; 
he must speak of wars, he must speak of legislation, 
he must often speak of religious disputes, and of 
questions of political economy. Yet he cannot be 
at once soldier, seaman, statesman, lawyer, clergyman, 
and merchant. Clearly then there is a distinction to 
be drawn somewhere, there must be a point up to 
which an unprofessional judgment of a professional 
subject may be not only competent but of high au¬ 
thority ; although beyond that point it cannot venture 
without presumption and folly. 

The distinction seems to lie originally in the dif¬ 
ference between the power of doing a thing, and 
that of perceiving whether it be well done or not. 
He who lives in the house, says Aristotle, is a better 


LECTURE IV. 


153 


judge of its being a good or a bad one, than the 
builder of it. He can tell not only whether the 
house is good or bad, but wherein its defects consist; 
he can say to the builder, This chimney smokes, or 
has a bad draught: or this arrangement of the rooms 
is inconvenient; and yet he may be quite unable to 
cure the chimney, or to draw out a plan for his rooms 
which would on the whole suit him better. Nay, 
sometimes he can even see where the fault is which 
has caused the mischief, and yet he may not know 
practically how to remedy it. Following up this 
principle, it would appear that what we understand 
least in the profession of another is the detail of his 
practice; we may appreciate his object, may see 
where he has missed it, or where he is pursuing it ill; 
nay, may understand generally the method of setting 
about it; but we fail in the minute details. Apply¬ 
ing this to the art of war, and we shall see, I think, 
that the part which unprofessional men can least 
understand is what is technically called tactic, the 
practical management of the men in action or even 
upon parade; the handling, so to speak, of them¬ 
selves, no less than the actual handling of their 
weapons. Let a man be as versed as he will in 
military history, he must well know that in these 
essentiabpoints of the last resort he is helpless, and 
the commonest serjeant, or the commonest soldier, 
knows infinitely more of the matter than he does. 
But in proportion as we recede from these details to 
more general points, first to what is technically called 
strategy, that is to say, the directing the movements 


154 


LECTURE IV. 


of an army with a view to the accomplishment oi 
the object of the campaign; and next to the whole 
conduct of the war, as political or moral questions 
may affect it, in that proportion general knowledge 
and powers of mind come into play, and an unpro¬ 
fessional person may without blame speak or write 
on military subjects, and may judge of them suf¬ 
ficiently. 

Thus much premised, we may venture to look a 
little at the history of the great external contests of 
Europe, and as all our historians are full of de¬ 
scriptions of wars and battles, we will see what 
lessons are to be gained from them, and what 
questions arise out of them. 

The highest authority in such matters, the 
Emperor Napoleon, has told us expressly that as a 
study for a soldier there were only four generals in 
modern history whose campaigns were worth follow¬ 
ing in detail; namely Turenne, Montecuculi, Eugene 
of Savoy, and Frederick of Prussia. It was only an 
unworthy feeling which made him omit the name of 
Marlborough; and no one could hesitate to add to 
the list his own. But he spoke of generals who 
were dead, and of course in adding no other name to 
this catalogue/1 am following the same rule. Marl¬ 
borough and Eugene, Frederick and Napoleon, are 
generals whose greatness the commonest reader can 
feel, because he sees the magnitude of their exploits. 
But the campaigns of Turenne and Montecuculi on 
the Rhine, where they were opposed to each other, 
although Napoleon’s testimony is quite sufficient to 


LECTURE IV. 


155 


establish their value as a professional study for a 
soldier, are yet too much confined to movements of 
detail to be readily appreciated by others. Turenne’s 
military reputation we must for the most part take 
upon trust, not disputing it, but being unable to ap¬ 
preciate it. On the other hand, the general reader 
will turn with interest to many points of military 
history which Napoleon disregarded: the greatness 
of the stake at issue, the magnitude of the events, 
the moral or intellectual qualities displayed by the 
contending parties, are to us exceedingly interesting; 
although I confess that I think the interest 
heightened when there is added to all these ele¬ 
ments that of consummate military ability besides. 

One of the most certain of all lessons of military 
history, although some writers have neglected it, and 
some have even disputed it, is the superiority of dis¬ 
cipline to enthusiasm. Much serious mischief has 
been done by an ignorance or disbelief of this truth; 
and if ever the French had landed in this country in 
the early part of the late war, we might have been 
taught it by a bitter experience. The defeat of Cope’s 
army by the Highlanders at Preston Pans is no ex¬ 
ception to this rule, for it was not the enthusiasm of 
the Highlanders which w T on the day, but their novel 
manner of fighting which perplexed their enemies; 
and the Highlanders had besides a discipline of their 
own which made them to a certain degree efficient 
soldiers. But as soon as the surprise was over, and 
an officer of even moderate ability w^as placed at the 
head of the royal army, the effect of the higher 


156 


LECTURE IV. 


discipline and superior tactic of one of the regular 
armies of Europe became instantly visible, and the 
victory at Culloden was won with no difficulty. 
Even in France, where the natural genius of the 
people for war is greater than in any other country, 
and although the enthusiasm of the Vendeans was 
directed by officers of great ability, yet the arrival of 
the old soldiers of the garrison of Mentz immediately 
decided the contest, and gave them a defeat from 
which they could never recover. On the other hand, 
while not even the most military nations can become 
good soldiers without discipline, yet with discipline 
even the most unmilitary can be made efficient; of 
which no more striking instance can be given than 
the high military character of our Sepoy army in 
India. The first thing then to be done in all warfare, 
whether foreign or domestic, is to discipline our men, 
and till they are thoroughly disciplined to avoid above 
all things the exposing them to any general actions 
with the enemy. History is full indeed of instances 
of great victories gained by a very small force over a 
very large one; but not by undisciplined men, however 
brave and enthusiastic, over those who were well 
disciplined, except under peculiar circumstances of 
surprise or local advantages, such as cannot affect the 
truth of the general rule. 

It is a question of some interest, whether history 
justifies the belief of an inherent superiority in some 
races of men over others, or whether all such differ¬ 
ences are only accidental and temporary; and we are 
to acquiesce in the judgment of king Arcliidamus, 


LECTURE IV. 


157 


that one man naturally differs little from another, 
but that culture and training makes the distinction. 
There are some very satisfactory examples to shew 
that a nation must not at any rate assume lightly 
that it is superior to another, because it may have 
gained great victories over it. Judging by the ex¬ 
perience of the period from 1796 to 1809, we might 
say that the French were decidedly superior to the, 
Austrians; and so the campaign of 1806 might seem 
to shew an equal superiority over the Prussians. 
Yet in the long struggle between the Austrian and 
French monarchies, the military success of each are 
wonderfully balanced; in 1796, whilst Napoleon was 
defeating army after army in Italy, the archduke 
Charles was driving Jourdan and Moreau before 
him out of Germany; and Frederick the Great de¬ 
feated the French at Rosbach as completely and 
easily as Napoleon defeated the Prussians at Jena. 
The military character of the Italians is now low: 
yet without going back to the Roman times, we find 
that in the sixteenth century the inhabitants of the 
Roman states were reputed to possess in an eminent 
degree the qualities of soldiers, and some of the 
ablest generals of Europe, Alexander Farnese prince 
of Parma, Spinola, and Montecuculi, were natives of 
Italy. In our own contests with France, our supe¬ 
riority has not always been what our national vanity 
would imagine it; Philip Augustus and Louis the 
Ninth were uniformly successful against John and 
Henry the Third; the conquests of Edward the 
Third and Henry the Fifth were followed by periods 


158 


LECTURE IV. 


of equally unvaried disasters; and descending to 
later times, if Marlborough was uniformly victorious, 
yet king William when opposed to Luxembourg, 
and the duke of Cumberland when opposed to Mar¬ 
shal Saxe, were no less uniformly beaten. Such ex¬ 
amples are, I think, satisfactory ; for judging calmly, 
we would not surely wish that one nation should be 
uniformly and inevitably superior to another; I do 
not know what national virtue could safely be sub¬ 
jected to so severe a temptation. If there be, as 
perhaps there are, some physical and moral qualities 
enjoyed by some nations in a higher degree than by 
others, and this, so far as we see, constitutionally; 
yet the superiority is not so great but that a little 
over presumption and carelessness on one side, or a 
little increased activity and more careful discipline 
on the other, and still more any remarkable indi¬ 
vidual genius in the generals or in the government, 
may easily restore the balance, or even turn it the 
other way. It is quite a different thing and very 
legitimate to feel that we have such qualities as will 
save us from ever being despicable enemies, or from 
being easily defeated by others; but it is much 
better that we should not feel so confident, as to 
think that others must always be defeated by us. 

But the thoughtful student of military history will 
find other questions suggesting themselves of a 
deeper interest; he will consider whether the laws 
of war, as at present acknowledged, are not suscept¬ 
ible of further improvement; he will wish to make 
out the real merits of certain cases, which historians 


LECTURE IV. 


159 


seem always to decide from mere partial feelings, 
according to tlie parties concerned, rather than by 
any fixed principle. For what is sometimes and by 
one party called an heroic national resistance, is by 
others called insurrection and brigandage; and what, 
according to one version, are but strong and just 
severities for the maintenance of peace, are, accord¬ 
ing to another, wholesale murders and military 
massacres. Now certainly, if there be no other rule 
in this matter than the justice of either party’s 
cause, the case is evidently incapable of decision till 
the end of time; for in every war, whether civil or 
foreign, both sides alw T ays maintain that they are in 
the right. But this being a point always assumed 
by one party and denied by the other, it is much 
better that it should be put aside altogether, and 
that the merits or demerits of what is called a 
national war should be tried on some more tangible 
and acknowledged ground. Now it seems one of 
the greatest improvements of the modern law r s of 
war, that regular armies are considered to be the 
only belligerents, and that the inhabitants of a 
country which shall happen to be the seat of war, 
shall be regarded as neutrals, and protected both in 
their persons and property. It is held that such 
a system does but prevent gratuitous horrors; a 
treacherous and assassinating kind of warfare on one 
side, and on the other cruelties and outrages of the 
worst description, in which the most helpless part of 
the population, the sick and the aged, women and 
children, are the greatest sufferers. But it is quite 


160 


LECTURE IV. 


essential that this system of forbearance should be 
equally observed by both parties ; if soldiers plunder 
or set fire to a village they cannot complain if the 
inhabitants cut off their stragglers, or shoot at them 
from behind walls and hedges; and, on the other 
hand, if the inhabitants of a village will go out on 
their own account to annoy an enemy’s march, to in¬ 
terrupt his communications, and to fire upon his 
men wherever they can find them, they too must be 
patient if the enemy in return burn their village, 
and hang them up as brigands. For it is idle to 
say that the mere circumstance that an army is in¬ 
vading its enemy’s country, puts it out of the pale of 
civilized hostility; or, at any rate, if this be main¬ 
tained, it is worse than idle to say that it may not 
retaliate this system, and put out of the pale of civil¬ 
ized hostility those who have begun so to deal with 
them. The truth is, that if war, carried on by regu¬ 
lar armies under the strictest discipline, is yet a 
great evil, an irregular partisan warfare is an evil 
ten times more intolerable; it is in fact no other 
than to give a license to a whole population to 
commit all sorts of treachery, rapine, and cruelty, 
without any restraint; letting loose a multitude of 
armed men, with none of the obedience and none of 
the honourable feelings of a soldier; cowardly be¬ 
cause they are undisciplined, and cruel because they 
are cowardly. It seems then the bounden duty of 
every government, not only not to encourage such 
irregular warfare on the part of its population, but 
carefully to repress it, and to oppose its enemy only 


LECTURE IV. 


161 


with its regular troops, or with men regularly organ¬ 
ized, and acting under authorized officers, who shall 
observe the ordinary humanities of civilized war. 
And what are called patriotic insurrections, or irre¬ 
gular risings of the whole population to annoy an in¬ 
vading army by all means, ought impartially to be 
condemned, by whomsoever and against whomsoever 
practised, as a resource of small and doubtful effi¬ 
cacy, but full of certain atrocity, and a most terrible 
aggravation of the evils of war. Of course, if an in¬ 
vading army sets the example of such irregular war¬ 
fare, if they proceed after the manner of the ancients 
to lay waste, the country in mere wantonness, to 
burn houses, and to be guilty of personal outrages on 
the inhabitants, then they themselves invite retalia¬ 
tion, and a guerilla warfare against such an invader 
becomes justifiable. But our censure in all cases 
should have reference not to the justice of the ori¬ 
ginal war, which is a point infinitely disputable, but 
to the simple fact, which side first set the example of 
departing from the laws of civilized warfare, and of 
beginning a system of treachery and atrocity. 

As this is a matter of some importance, I may be 
allowed to dwell a little longer upon a vague notion 
not uncommonly, as I believe, entertained, that a 
people whose country is attacked, by which is meant, . 
whose territory is the seat of war, are sustaining 
some intolerable wrong which they are justified in 
repelling by any and every means. But in the 
natural course of things, war must be carried on in 

the territory of one belligerent or of the other, it is 

M 


1G2 


LECTURE IV. 


an accident merely if their fighting ground happen 
to be the country of some third party. Now it can¬ 
not be said that the party which acts on the offen¬ 
sive, w r ar having been once declared, becomes in the 
wrong by doing so, or that the object of all invasion 
is conquest. You invade your enemy in order to 
compel him to do you justice; that is, to force him 
to make peace on reasonable terms. This is your 
theory of the case, and it is one which must be al¬ 
lowed to be maintainable just as much as your 
enemy’s, for all laws of war waive and must waive 
the question as to the original justice of the quarrel; 
they assume that both parties are equally in the right. 
But suppose invasion for the sake of conquest, I do 
not say of the whole of your enemy’s country, but of 
that portion of it which you are invading; as we have 
many times invaded French colonies with a view to 
their incorporation permanently with the British do¬ 
minions. Conquests of such a sort are no violations 
necessarily of the legitimate object of war, they may 
be considered as a security taken for the time to 
come. Yet undoubtedly the shock to the inhabit¬ 
ants of the particular countries so invaded is very 
great; it was not a light thing for the Canadian, or 
the inhabitant of Trinidad, or of the Cape of Good 
Hope, to be severed from the people of his own 
blood and language, from his own mother state, and 
to be subjected to the dominion of foreigners, men 
with a strange language, strange manners, a dif¬ 
ferent church, and a different law. That the in¬ 
habitants of such countries should enlist very zea- 


LECTURE IV. 


1(33 

Ion sly in the militia, and should place the resources 
of defence very readily in the hands of the govern¬ 
ment, is quite just and quite their duty; I am only 
deprecating the notion that they should rise in irre¬ 
gular warfare, each man or each village for itself, 
and assail the invaders as their personal enemies, 
killing them whenever and wherever they can find 
them. Or again, suppose that the invasion is under¬ 
taken for the purpose of overthrowing the existing 
government of a country, as the attempted French 
descents to co-operate with the Jacobites, or the in¬ 
vasion of France by the coalesced powers in 1792 
and 1793, and again in 1814 and 1815. When the 
English army advanced into France in 1814, respect¬ 
ing persons and property, and paying for every 
article of food which they took from the country, 
would it have been for the inhabitants to barricade 
every village, to have lurked in every thicket and 
behind every wall to shoot stragglers and sentinels, 
and keep up night and day a war of extermination ? 
If indeed the avowed object of the invader be the 
destruction not of any particular government, but of 
the national existence altogether; if he thus dis¬ 
claims the usual object of legitimate war, a fair and 
lasting peace, and declares that he makes it a war ot 
extermination, he doubtless cannot complain if the 
usual laws of war are departed from against him 
when he himself sets the example. But even then, 
when we consider what unspeakable atrocities a par- 
tisan warfare gives birth to, and that no nation 
attacked by an overwhelming force of disciplined 

m 2 


1G4 


LECTURE IV. 


armies was ever saved by such means, it may be 
doubted even then whether it be justifiable, unless 
the invader drives the inhabitants to it, by treating 
them from the beginning as enemies, and outrag¬ 
ing their persons and property. If this judgment 
seem extreme to any one, I would only ask him to 
consider well first the cowardly, treacherous, and 
atrocious character of all guerilla warfare, and in the 
next place the certain misery which it entails on the 
country which practises it, and its inefficacy, as a 
general rule, to conquer or expel an enemy, however 
much it may annoy him. 

Other questions will also occur to us, questions I 
grant of some theoretical and much practical diffi¬ 
culty, yet which surely require to be seriously con¬ 
sidered. I allude particularly to the supposed right 
of sacking a town taken by assault, and of blockading 
a town defended not by the inhabitants but by a gar¬ 
rison wholly independent of their control; the 
known consequences of such a blockade being the 
starvation of the inhabitants before the garrison can 
be made to suffer. The extreme hardness in such 
cases is that the penalty falls chiefly on the innocent. 
When a town is sacked we do not commonly hear 
of the garrison being put to the sword in cold blood, 
on the plea that they have no right to quarter. 
General Philippon and his garrison laid down their 
arms at Badajoz, and were treated as prisoners of 
war, whilst the houses of the Spanish inhabitants 
were plundered. And be it remembered, that when 
we speak of plundering a town after an assault, we 


LECTURE IV. 


165 


veil under that softer name all crimes which man in 
his woist excesses can commit, horrors so atrocious 
that their very atrocity preserves them from our full 
execration, because it makes it impossible to describe 
them. On this subject, on the abominable character 
of such scenes, and the possibility of preventing 
them, I will give you not my own crude opinion, 
who know nothing of the actual state of armies at 
such moments, but that of a veteran soldier, who 
knows well the horrors of war while he deeply feels 
its stirring power, and its opportunities of nobleness, 
the historian of the war in the Spanish peninsula. 
General Napier’s language is as follows: 

“ It is a common but shallow and mischievous 
notion, that a villain makes never the worse soldier 
for an assault, because the appetite for plunder 
supplies the place of honour; as if the conppatibility 
of vice and bravery rendered the union of virtue and 
courage unnecessary in warlike matters. In all the 
host which stormed San Sebastian, there was not a 
man who being sane would for plunder only have en¬ 
countered the danger of that assault, yet under the 
spell of discipline all rushed eagerly to meet it. 
Discipline however has its root in patriotism, or how 
could armed men be controlled at all, and it would 
be wise and far from difficult to graft moderation 
and humanity upon such a noble stock. The modem 
soldier is not necessarily the stern bloody-handed 
man the ancient soldier was ; there is as much dif¬ 
ference between them as between the sportsman and 
the butcher; the ancient warrior fighting with the 


166 


LECTURE IV. 


sword and reaping his harvest of death when the 
enemy was in flight, became habituated to the act of 
slaying. The modern soldier seldom uses his bayonet, 
sees not his peculiar victim fall, and exults not over 
mangled limbs as proofs of personal prowess. Hence 
preserving his original feelings, his natural abhorrence 
of murder and crimes of violence, he differs not from 
other men unless often engaged in the assault of 
towns, where rapacity, lust, and inebriety, unchecked 
by the restraints of discipline, are excited by tempta¬ 
tion. It is said that no soldier can be restrained 
after storming a town, and a British soldier least of 
all, because he is brutish and insensible to honour! 
Shame on such calumnies! What makes the British 
soldier fight as no other soldier ever fights ? His pay ? 
Soldiers of all nations receive pay. At the period of 
this assault, a sergeant of the twenty-eighth regiment 
named Ball, had been sent with a party to the coast 
from Roncesvalles, to make purchases for his officers. 
He placed the money he was entrusted with, two 
thousand dollars, in the hands of a commissary, and 
having secured a receipt, persuaded his party to join 
in the storm. He survived, reclaimed the money, 
made his purchases, and returned to his regiment. 
And these are the men, these are the spirits, who are 
called too brutish to work upon except by fear. It 
is precisely fear to which they are most insensible. 

“ Undoubtedly if soldiers read and hear that it is 
impossible to restrain their violence they will not be 
restrained. But let the plunder of a town after an 
assault be expressly made criminal by the articles of 


LECTURE IV. 


167 


war, with a due punishment attached ; let it be con¬ 
stantly impressed upon the troops that such conduct 
is as much opposed to military honour and discipline 
as it is to morality; let a select permanent body of 
men receiving higher pay form a part of the army, 
and be charged to follow storming columns to aid in 
preserving order, and with power to inflict instant¬ 
aneous punishment, death if it be necessary. Finally, 
as reward for extraordinary Valour should keep pace 
with chastisement for crimes committed under such 
temptation, it would be fitting that money, ap¬ 
portioned to the danger and importance of the 

N 

service, should be ensured to the successful troops, 
and always paid without delay. This money might 
be taken as ransom from enemies, but if the inha¬ 
bitants are friends, or too poor, government should 
furnish the amount. With such regulations, the 
storming of towns would not produce more military 
disorders than the gaining of battles in the field.” a 
The other case on which it seems desirable that 
the law of nations should either be amended, or 
declared more clearly and enforced in practice, is 
that of the blockade of towns not defended by their 
inhabitants, in order to force their surrender by 
starvation. And here let us try to realize to our¬ 
selves what such a blockade is. We need not, un¬ 
happily, draw a fancied picture; history, and no 
remote history either, will supply us with the facts. 
Some of you, I doubt not, remember Genoa; you 
have seen that queenly city with its streets of palaces, 

a History of the War in the Peninsula. Vol. vi. p. 215. 


168 


LECTURE IV. 


rising tier above tier from the water, girdling with 
the long lines of its bright white houses the vast 
sweep of its harbour, the mouth of which is marked 
by a huge natural mole of rock, crowned by its mag¬ 
nificent light-house tower. You remember how its 
white houses rose out of a mass of fig and olive and 
orange trees, the glory of its old patrician luxury; 
you may have observed the mountains behind the 
town spotted at intervals by small circular low towers, 
one of which is distinctly conspicuous where the 
ridge of the hills rises to its summit, and hides from 
view all the country behind it. Those towers are 
the forts of the famous lines, which, curiously re¬ 
sembling in shape the later Syracusan walls enclosing 
Epipolee, converge inland from the eastern and 
western extremities of the city, looking down, the 
western line on the valley of the Polcevera, the 
eastern on that of the Bisagno, till they meet as I 
have said on the summit of the mountains, where 
the hills cease to rise from the sea, and become more 
or less of a table land running off towards the in¬ 
terior, at the distance, as well as I remember, of 
between two and three miles from the outside of the 
city. Thus a very large open space is enclosed 
within the lines, and Genoa is capable therefore of be¬ 
coming a vast entrenched camp, holding not so much 
a garrison as an army. In the autumn of 1799 the 
Austrians had driven the French out of Lombardy and 
Piedmont; their last victory of Fossano or Genola 
had won the fortress of Coni or Cuneo close under 
the Alps, and at the very extremity of the plain of 


LECTURE IV. 


169 


the Po; the French clung to Italy only by their 
hold of the Riviera of Genoa, the narrow strip of 
coast between the Apennines and the sea, which ex¬ 
tends from the frontiers of France almost to the 
mouth of the Arno. Hither the remains of the 
French force were collected, commanded by general 
Massena. and the point of chief importance to his 
defence was the city of Genoa. Napoleon had just 
returned from Egypt, and was become First Consul; 
but he could not be expected to take the field till 
the following spring, and till then Massena was hope¬ 
less of relief from without, every thing was to depend 
on his own pertinacity. The strength of his army 
made it impossible to force it in such a position as 
Genoa; but its very numbers, added to the popula¬ 
tion of a great city, held out to the enemy a hope of 
reducing it by famine ; and as Genoa derives most of 
its supplies by sea, Lord Keith, the British naval 
commander-in-chief in the Mediterranean, lent the 
assistance of his naval force to the Austrians, and by 
the vigilance of his cruizers, the whole coasting trade 
right and left along the Riviera was effectually cut 
off. It is not at once that the inhabitants of a great 
city, accustomed to the daily sight of well-stored 
shops and an abundant market, begin to realize the 
idea of scarcity; or that the wealthy classes of 
society, who have never known any other state than 
one of abundance and luxury, begin seriously to con¬ 
ceive of famine. But the shops were emptied, and 
the storehouses began to be drawn upon ; and no 
fresh supply or hope of supply appeared. Winter 


170 


LECTURE IV. 


passed away, and spring returned, so early and so 
beautiful on that garden-like coast, sheltered as it is 
from the north winds by its belt of mountains, and 
open to the full rays of the southern sun. Spring 
returned, and clothed the hill sides within the lines 
with its fresh verdure. But that verdure was no 
longer the mere delight of the careless eye of luxury, 
refreshing the citizens by its liveliness and softness 
when they rode or walked up thither from the city 
to enjoy the surpassing beauty of the prospect. The 
green hill sides were now visited for a very different 
object; ladies of the highest rank might be seen 
cutting up every plant which it was possible to turn 
to food, and bearing home the common weeds of our 
roadsides as a most precious treasure. The French 
general pitied the distress of the people, but the 
lives and strength of his garrison seemed to him 
more important than the lives of the Genoese, and 
such provisions as remained were reserved in the first 
place for the French army. Scarcity became utter 
want, and want became famine. In the most 
gorgeous palaces of that gorgeous city, no less than in 
the humblest tenements of its humblest poor, death 
was busy; not the momentary death of battle or 
massacre, nor the speedy death of pestilence, but 
the lingering and most miserable death of famine. 
Infants died before their parents’ eyes, husbands and 
wives lay down to expire together. A man whom I saw 
at Genoa in 1825 told me that his father and two of 
his brothers had been starved to death in this fatal 
siege. So it went on, till in the month of June, 


LECTURE IV. 


171 


when Napoleon had already descended from the Alps 
into the plain of Lombardy, the misery became un¬ 
endurable, and Massena surrendered. But before he 
did so, twenty thousand innocent persons, old and 
young, women and children, had died by the most 
horrible of deaths which humanity can endure. 
Other horrors which occurred besides during this 
blockade I pass over ; the agonizing death of twenty 
thousand innocent and helpless persons requires 
nothing to be added to it. 

Now is it right that such a tragedy as this should 
take place, and that the laws of war should be sup¬ 
posed to justify the authors of it ? Conceive having 
been a naval officer in Lord Keith’s squadron at 
that time, and being employed in stopping the food 
which was being brought for the relief of such 
misery. For the thing was done deliberately; the 
helplessness of the Genoese was known, their distress 
was known; it was known that they could not force 
Massena to surrender; it was known that they were 
dying daily by hundreds; yet week after week, and 
month after month, did the British ships of war keep 
their iron watch along all the coast: no vessel nor 
boat laden with any article of provision could escape 
their vigilance. One cannot but be thankful that 
Nelson was spared from commanding at this horrible 
blockade of Genoa. 

Now on which side the law of nations should 
throw the guilt of most atrocious murder, is of little 
comparative consequence, or whether it should attach 
it to both sides equally: but that the deliberate 


172 


LECTURE IV. 


starving to death of twenty thousand helpless persons 
should he regarded as a crime in one or both of the 
parties concerned in it, seems to me self-evident. 
The simplest course would seem to be that all non- 
combatants should be allowed to go out of a block¬ 
aded town, and that the general who should refuse 
to let them pass, should be regarded in the same 
light as one who were to murder his prisoners, or 
who were to be in the habit of butchering women 
and children. For it is not true that war only looks 
to the speediest and most effectual way of attaining 
its object, so that as the letting the inhabitants go 
out would enable the garrison to maintain the town 
longer, the laws of war authorize the keeping them 
in and starving them. Poisoning wells might be a 
still quicker method of reducing a place, but do the 
laws of war therefore sanction it? I shall not be 
supposed for a moment to be placing the guilt of the 
individuals concerned in the two cases which I am 
going to compare, on an equal footing; it would be 
most unjust to do so, for in the one case they acted, 
as they supposed, according to a law which made 
what they did their duty. But take the cases them¬ 
selves, and examine them in all their circumstances; 
the degree of suffering inflicted, the innocence and 
helplessness of the sufferers, the interests at stake, 
and the possibility of otherwise securing them ; and 
if any man can defend the lawfulness in the abstract 
of the starvation of the inhabitants of Genoa, I will 
engage also to establish the lawfulness of the mas¬ 
sacres of September. 


LECTURE IV. 


173 


Other points of the received law of nations might 
be noticed, and more especially of maritime law, 
which require, to say the least, a full reconsideration. 
They will suggest themselves to the attentive reader 
of history, if his thoughts have been once turned in 
that direction. And, considering the magnitude of 
the interests involved, any defect in national law is 
surely no less important than a defect in civil law; 
to lend a sanction to the passions and injustice of 
men where they operate most extensively, is a sad 
perversion of the nature of law; it is that corrup¬ 
tion of the noblest thing which is itself the vilest. 
But in these enquiries, amidst all our condemnation 
of a bad law, we must remember that its very evil 
consists mainly in this, that it throws its sanction 
over crime; that is, that men commit crime as a 
thing lawful. The magnitude of the evil of a bad 
law is, I was almost going to say, the measure of the 
allowance to be granted to the individuals whom it 
misleads; at any rate it greatly diminishes their 
guilt. And for this reason I chose in the instances 
which I gave of faulty national law, to take those in 
which our countrymen acted upon the bad law, 
rather than those in which it was acted upon by 
foreigners or enemies. In our own case we are will¬ 
ing enough to make that allowance which in the 
case of others we might be inclined to refuse. Gene¬ 
rally, however, I confess, that amongst ourselves, and 
when we are not concerned to establish our own just 
claims to the respect of others, I think that it is 
more useful to contemplate our own national faults 


174 


LECTURE IV. 


and the worthy deeds of other nations, than to take 
the opposite course; or even to dwell singly upon 
our own glories, or on the dishonour of others. For 
there can be, I imagine, no danger of our admiring 
our neigbours too much, or ourselves too little. It 
cannot be necessary to enlarge before an English 
audience upon the greatness of England, whether 
past or present: it cannot be necessary for an Eng¬ 
lishman to express in so many words his love and 
admiration for his country. It is because England is 
so great, and our love for our country is so deep and 
so just, that we can not only afford to dwell upon 
the darker spots in our history, but we absolutely re¬ 
quire them, lest our love and admiration should be¬ 
come idolatrous; it is because we are only too apt to 
compare foreign nations with ourselves unfavourably, 
that it is absolutely good for us to contemplate what 
they have suffered unjustly or done worthily. 

Connected with the last point which I have been 
noticing, is another which appears to me of import¬ 
ance in studying military or external history, and 
that is, to apprehend correctly in every war what are 
the merits of the quarrel. I do not mean only so far 
as such an apprehension is essential to our sympa¬ 
thizing rightly with either of the parties concerned 
in it, but with a higher object; that we may see, 
namely, what have been ordinarily the causes of wars, 
and then consider whether they have been sufficient 
to justify recourse to such an extreme arbitrament. 
For as I speak freely of the intense interest of mili¬ 
tary history, and the great sympathy due to the many 


LECTURE IV. 


175 


heroic qualities which war calls into action, so we 
must never forget that war is after all a very great 
evil; and though I believe that theoretically the 
quakers are wrong in pronouncing all wars to be un¬ 
justifiable, yet I confess that historically the excep¬ 
tions to their doctrine have been comparatively few; 
that is to say, as in every war one party I suppose 
must be to blame, so in most wars both parties have 
been blamable; and the wars ought never to have 
taken place at all. Two cases of wars where both 
parties appear to me more or less to blame, I will 
now give by way of example. It sometimes happens, 
especially in the intercourse of a civilized nation with 
barbarians, that the subjects of one nation persist in 
a course of conduct at variance with the laws of the 
other; and that the party thus aggrieved takes its 
redress into its own hands and punishes the offenders, 
summarily, with over severity perhaps, and sometimes 
mistakenly: that is, the individuals punished may in 
that particular case be innocent; as it has often hap¬ 
pened that when soldiers fire upon a riotous crowd, 
some harmless passers by are the sufferers, although 
they had no concern whatever in the riot. It cannot 
be denied that the party originally aggrieved has 
now given some just cause of complaint against it¬ 
self ; yet it is monstrous in the original aggressor to 
prosecute his quarrel forthwith by arms, or to insist 
peremptorily on receiving satisfaction for the wrong 
done to him, without entering into the question of the 
previous and unprovoked wrong which had been 
done by him. For after all, the balance of wrong is 


176 


LECTURE IV. 


not, when all things are taken into the account, so 
much as brought to a level: the original debtor is 
the debtor still; some counter claims he has upon his 
creditor; but the balance of the account is against 
him. Yet he goes to war as if it were not only in 
his favour, but as if his adversary had suffered no 
wrong at all, and he had done none. 

The other case is one of greater difficulty, and has 
been the fruitful parent of wars continued from genera¬ 
tion to generation. This is where nations suspect each 
other, and the suspicion has in the case of either 
enough to justify it. Thus what one party claims as 
a security, the other regards as a fresh aggression; 
and so the quarrel goes on interminably. The Punic 
wars in ancient history are one instance of this: the 
long wars between France and the coalesced powers 
in our own times are another. At a given moment 
in the contest the government on one side may feel 
sure of its own honest intentions, and suspect with 
justice the hostile disposition of its rival. But in all 
fairness, the previous steps of the struggle must be 
reviewed; have our predecessors never acted in such 
a way as to inspire suspicion justly? We stand in 
their place, the inheritors of their cause, and the sus¬ 
picions which their conduct occasioned still survive 
towards us. Our enemy is dealing insincerely with us, 
because he cannot be persuaded that we mean fairly 
by him. A great evil, and one almost endless, if 
each party refuses to put itself in the other’s place, 
and presses merely the actual fact of the moment, 
that while it is dealing in all sincerity, its adversary 


LECTURE IV. 


177 


is meditating only deceit and hostility. In such 
cases I cannot but think that the guilt of the con¬ 
tinued quarrel must be divided, not equally perhaps, 
but divided, between both the belligerents. 

And now coming to the mere history of military 
operations themselves, in what manner may a com¬ 
mon reader best enter into them, and read them with 
interest ? It is notorious, I believe, that our ordinary 
notions of wars are very much those which we find 
in the accounts of the Samnite wars in Livy. We 
remember the great battles, sometimes with much par¬ 
ticularity ; but they stand in our memory as isolated 
events; we cannot connect them with each other, we 
know not what led to them, nor what was their bear¬ 
ing on the fate of the campaign. Sometimes, it is 
true, this is of no great consequence; for the pre¬ 
vious movements were no more than the Homeric oi 


S’ ore 8r) a^eSov rjcrav eir dWTjXoicriP lovres, the armies 
marched out to meet each other, and the battle de¬ 
cided every thing. But in complicated wars it is 
very different. Take for instance the wars of Frede¬ 
rick the Great; we may remember that he was de¬ 
feated at Kolin, at Hochkirchen, and at Cunersdorf. 
that he was victorious at Rosbach, at Lissa, at Zorn- 
dorf, and at Torgau ; but how far are we still from 
comprehending the action of the war, and appreciat¬ 
ing his extraordinary ability. To do this, a good map 
is essential; a map which shall exhibit the hills of a 
country, its principal roads, and its most important 
fortresses. To understand the operations of the 
Seven Years’ War, we must comprehend the situa- 


N 


178 


LECTURE IV. 


tion of the Prussian dominions with respect to those 
of the allies, and must know also their geographical 
character, as well as that of the countries immediately 
adjoining them. We must observe the importance of 
Saxony, as covering Prussia on the side of Austria; the 
importance of Silesia, as running in deeply within what 
may be called the line of the Austrian frontier, and 
flanking a large part of Bohemia. For these reasons 
Frederick began the war by surprising Saxony, and 
amidst all his difficulties clung resolutely to the pos¬ 
session of Silesia. His vulnerable side was on the east 
towards Russia; and had the Russian power been in 
any degree such as it became afterwards, he would 
have lost Berlin not once only, but permanently. 
But the Russian armies being better fitted for de¬ 
fence than offence, even their great victory of Cu- 
nersdorf was followed by no important consequences, 
and Frederick was able generally to leave the defence 
of his eastern frontiers to his generals, and to devote 
his own attention to the great struggle with Austria 
on the side of Saxony and Silesia. 

Connected with the details of military history, and 
in itself in many respects curious, is the history, so 
flu* as it can be traced, of great roads and fortresses; 
for these, like all other earthly things, change from 
age to age, and if we do not know or observe these 
changes, the military history of one period will be al¬ 
most unintelligible, if judged of according to the 
roads and fortresses of another. For example, there 
aie at present three great lines of communication 
between the north-west of Italy and the Rhone: one 


LECTURE IV. 


179 


is the coast road from Nice to Marseilles, and 
Tarascon or Avignon ; another is the road over Mont 
Cenis upon Montmeillan, and so descending the 
valley of the Isere by Grenoble upon Valence; a 
third is the road so well known to all travellers, from 
Montmeillan upon Chamberri, and from thence by 
Les Echelles upon Lyons. But in the early part of 
the sixteenth century, I find in the work of an 
Italian, named Gratarolo, who wrote a sort of guide 
for travellers, that the principal line of communica¬ 
tion between Italy and the Rhone was one which it 
now requires a good map even to trace; it crossed 
the Alps by the Mont Genevre, descended for a cer¬ 
tain distance along the valley of the Durance, and 
then struck off to the right, and went straight to¬ 
wards Avignon, by a little place called Sault, and by 
Carpentras. The abandonment in many instances of 
the line of the Roman roads in Italy is owing, as I 
have been informed, to the extreme insecurity of tra¬ 
velling during a long period; so that according to the 
description of a similar state of things in Scripture, 
“ the high ways were unoccupied, and the travellers 
walked through by-ways.” Merchants and those 
who were obliged to go from place to place followed 
by-roads, as nearly parallel as they could find them to 
the line of the great roads; and when a better state 
of things returned, the by-roads were become so 
much in use, that they remained the ordinary lines of 
communication, and the great roads of the Roman 
time went to ruin. So again with fortresses; when 
Charles the Fifth invaded Champagne in the six- 

n 2 


LECTURE IT. 


] 80 

teenth century, his army was resisted by the little 
town of St. Dizier, which is now perfectly open, and 
incapable of stopping an enemy for half a hour; while 
the fortresses which resisted the Prussians in 1792, 
Longwy and Verdun, seem to have been in Charles 
the Fifth’s days of no consequence whatever. The 
great Piedmontese fortress at this day is Alessandria, 
which I think hardly occurs in the military history of 
Piedmont previously to the wars of the French revo¬ 
lution. On the other hand, Turin itself, which was 
besieged so elaborately by Marshal Marsin in 1706, 
and so effectually relieved by Prince Eugene’s vic¬ 
torious assault on the besiegers’ lines, and the citadel 
of which was a fortress of some importance so late as 
1799, is now wholly an open town, and its ramparts 
are become a promenade. 

When speaking of the altered lines of roads, one 
is naturally led to think of the roads over great 
mountain chains, of which so many have been newly 
opened in our own days; and a few words on moun¬ 
tain warfare, which has been called the poetry of the 
military art, shall conclude this lecture. But by 
mountain warfare I do not mean the mere attack 
or defence of a mountain pass, such as we read of 
in the Tyrolese insurrection of 1809; but the attack 
and defence of a whole mountain country, compre¬ 
hending a line perhaps of eighty or a hundred miles. 
You have here almost all the elements of interest 
in war met together; the highest exercise of skill in 
the general in the combination of his operations; the 
greatest skill and energy in the officers and soldiers 


LECTURE IV, 


181 


in overcoming or turning to account the natural 
difficulties of the ground; and the picturesque and 
poetical charm of the grouping together of art and 
nature, of the greatest works and efforts of man 
with the highest magnificence of natural scenery. 
One memorable instance of this grand mountain 
warfare w T as the contest in the Pyrenees in 1813 ; 
another may be found in Napoleon’s operations in 
the Apennines, in the beginning of the campaign of 
1706, and those in the valley of the Adige in 
January 1797; a third, and in some respects the 
most striking of all, was the struggle in Switzerland 
in 1799, when the eastern side of Switzerland 
was made as it were one vast fortress, which the 
French defended against the attacks of the allies. 
In such warfare, a general must bear constantly in 
mind the whole anatomy of the mountains which he 
is defending or attacking: the geographical distance 
of the several valleys and passes from each other, 
their facilities of lateral communication, their exact 
bearings and windings, as well as the details of their 
natural features, and resources. He must also con¬ 
ceive the disposition of his enemy’s army, the force 
at each particular point, and the facilities of massing 
a large force at any one point in a given time. For 
a blow struck with effect at any one spot is felt 
along the whole line; and the strongest positions are 
sometimes necessarily abandoned without firing a 
shot, merely because a point has been carried at the 
distance of thirty or forty miles from them, by which 
the enemy may penetrate within their line and 


182 


LECTURE IV. 


threaten their rear. And surely the moving forty or 
fifty thousand men with such precision, that marching 
from many different quarters they may he all brought 
together at a given hour on a given spot, is a very 
magnificent combination, if we consider how many 
points must be embraced at once in the mind, in 
order to its conception, and how many more are 
essential to its successful execution. But lest I 
should seem here forgetting my own caution, and 
imitating the presumption of Hannibal’s sophist, I 
will only refer you to general Matthieu Dumas’ 
History of the Campaigns of 1799 and 1800, in 
which, illustrated as it is by its notes, you will find a 
very clear account of the particular contest in Swit¬ 
zerland, and some general remarks on mountain war¬ 
fare, very clear and very interesting. 

The subject is so vast that it would not be easy to 
exhaust it; but enough has been said perhaps to 
fulfil my immediate object, that of noticing some of 
the questions and difficulties which occur in military 
history; and I have lingered long enough upon 
ground on which my right as an unmilitary man to 
enter at all may possibly be questioned. Here then I 
shall end what I have to say with regard to external 
history: it follows that we should penetrate a little 
deeper, and endeavour to find some clue to guide us 
through the labyrinth of opinions and parties, politi¬ 
cal and religious, which constitute at once the diffi¬ 
culty and the interest of internal history. 


LECTURE V. 


I proposed that in the present lecture we should 
approach to the consideration of the internal history 
of the last three hundred or three hundred and forty 
years which have elapsed since the close of the 
middle ages. It is not without some peculiar ap¬ 
prehensions that I enter upon this part of my subject. 
Its difficulties are so great that I cannot hope to do 
more than partially remove them ; and still more, 
when we come to an analysis of opinions and parties, 
it is scarcely possible to avoid expressing or at least 
implying some judgments of my own which may be 
at variance with the judgments of many of my 
hearers. Yet with a full sense of all these impedi¬ 
ments in my way, I yet feel that I must proceed, 
and that to turn aside from the straightforward road 
would be an unworthy shrinking from one of the 
most important parts of my duty. For as I said at 
the beginning, any thing of the nature of a calm 
analysis of that on which we have been accustomed 
to feel much more than to think, cannot but be 


184 


LECTURE V. 


useful to us. Nor will it be the least valuable part 
of it that it should teach us to disentangle principles 
first from parties, and again from one another; first 
of all as shewing how imperfectly all parties re¬ 
present their own principles, and then, how the prin¬ 
ciples themselves are a mingled tissue, the good and 
evil being sometimes combined together; and 
practically, that which under some circumstances was 
good or evil, changing under different circumstances 
and becoming the opposite. 

Now here at the outset of our enquiry, I must 
again dwell for a moment on our peculiar advantages 
in this place in being made so familiar with the his¬ 
tories of Greece and of Rome. For in those his¬ 
tories is involved a great part of our own : they 
contain a view of our own society, only somewhat 
simplified, as befits an earlier and introductory study. 
And our familiarity with their details will be con¬ 
venient on the present occasion, because they will 
furnish us with many illustrations familiar already to 
all my hearers. Besides this, he who has studied 
Thucydides and Tacitus, and has added to them as 
so many of us have done, a familiar acquaintance 
with Aristotle, Plato, and Cicero, has already heard 
the masters of political wisdom, and will have 
derived from them some general rules to assist 
him in making his way through the thicket of 
modern history. 

When we surveyed the external history of the last 
three centuries, we found that there were at dif¬ 
ferent times different centres of action ; that at one 


LECTURE V. 


185 


time Austria was this centre, at another Spain, and 
at another France: so that if one were asked quite 
generally what was Europe doing externally at such 
or such a period, it might be answered that it was 
engaged in favouring or in resisting one or other of 
these great powers. Now if we ask at any given 
period, what Europe was doing internally, can we 
give an answer equally simple ? Has there been any 
principle predominant with respect to internal history, 
as successive nations have been in external matters, 
and has the advancing or putting down this principle 
been the great business of the mind of Europe, as 
the supporting or opposing Austrian or French 
dominion has been the business of her external policy 
and action ? 

Now for the convenience of division, and as an aid 
to our examination, we may say perhaps that there 
was : and we may divide the three last centuries into 
two periods, the first extending from 1500 to the 
middle of the seventeenth century, and the second 
going on from 1650 or 1660 to nearly our own times. 
And quite generally, we might answer that in the 
first of these periods Europe was engaged in main¬ 
taining or opposing the protestant reformation; in 
the second in maintaining or opposing a reformation, 
or to use a more neutral word, an alteration in matters 
political. Such a division, and such a view of each 

of the two parts of the division, would be allowable 

« 

and just, I think, if made for the mere.purpose of 
assisting our studies, while we were fully aware of 
its incompleteness. But if we believed it to be 


18 G 


LECTURE V. 


altogether correct, it would be sadly misleading; for 
in reality more than one principle has been con¬ 
tended for at one time: and what we call the pro- 
testant reformation is itself a complex thing, em¬ 
bracing a great many points, theological, moral, and 
political: and these points may not have been all 
pressed by the same persons, nor at the same time; 
and political reformation also is very variously under¬ 
stood; some wishing for greater changes, others for 
less; and the points most passionately desired by 
some being to others almost indifferent, or it may be, 
even objectionable. So that it becomes essential 
to carry our analysis a little farther, and to shew in 
this way what a complicated subject we have to deal 
with. 

Let us suppose for an instant that the whole 
struggle which has occupied the internal history of 
modern Europe has been a political one: we will 
take nothing more into the account than those 
questions which are ordinarily called political. Now 
then what is the real political question which is at 
the bottom of all others, or in other words, what is 
the principle of all political divisions ? Shall we say 
that it is this, whether political power shall be vested 
in a greater or less number of hands, the old Greek 
question in short as to the ascendancy of the many 
or the few ? Accordingly they who take one side of 
this question, which we call the popular side, should 
advocate, we will say, the communication of political 
power as widely as possible; those who take the anti- 
popular side, should wish it to be confined only to a 


LECTURE V. 


187 


few ? A complete democracy would appear to be the 
consummation of the wishes of the former, a simple 
monarchy would most answer the views of the latter. 
And thus if the contest be between a republic and 
an individual aiming at monarchy, men who espouse 
the popular party would wish well to the republic, 
their opponents would favour the attempt at monarchy. 
Accordingly in the greatest heat of the French 
revolution, this was the view taken of the civil wars 
of Rome; and the popular party in France revered 
the memory and on all occasions magnified the names 
of Cato and Brutus as true republicans, who were 
upholding the cause of liberty against a tyrant. Yet 
it is certain that this view was quite fallacious: that 
Cato and Brutus belonged not to the popular party 
at Rome but to the aristocratical; they belonged to 
that party which had steadily opposed the agrarian 
laws, and the communication of the Roman franchise 
to the allies; to the party which had destroyed the 
Gracchi, and had recovered its ascendancy through 
the proscriptions of Sylla. And it is no less certain 
that Caesar was supported by the popular party; and 
that when he marched into Italy at the beginning of 
the civil war his pretext was that he was come to up¬ 
hold the tribunician power, and in point of fact the 
mass of the inhabitants of Italy regarded him with 
favour. 

Here then the opposition of a republic to an in¬ 
dividual aiming at monarchy, is not the opposition of 
a popular party to an antipopular one, but exactly 
the reverse. Again, a similar mistake has been com- 


188 


LECTURE V. 


mitted with regard to parties in Carthage. Dr. 
Priestley, a most strenuous advocate of popular prin¬ 
ciples, in his Lectures on History sympathizes en¬ 
tirely with Hanno’s opposition to Hannibal; he is 
afraid that Hannibal’s standing army might have over¬ 
thrown the liberties of Carthage. Yet nothing is 
more certain than that Hanno belonged to the high 
aristocratical party, that same party which never 
forgave Hannibal for his attempt to lessen the powers 
of their exclusive courts of judicature. So that 
it is very possible that judging of political parties 
merely by their advocating the power of a greater or 
smaller number, we should estimate them quite 
erroneously. 

Again, what is at the bottom of our preference of 
what is called the popular cause, or of the anti- 
popular? Do we rest in the simple fact of the su¬ 
preme power being vested in more hands or in fewer? 
or do we value this fact only as a means to some 
farther end, such as the liberty and happiness of the 
several individuals of the commonwealth? Do we, 
in short, most value political equality, or the absence 
of restraint from us as individuals? It is manifest 
that as we value the one or the other, our estimate 
of a pure democracy may greatly differ. If our great 
object be equality, then the equal enjoyment of poli¬ 
tical rights and honours by all will seem to us the 
perfection of government: if the absence of restraint 
on individuals be what we most desire, then we may 
complain of the tyranny of a majority, of a severe 
system of sumptuary laws, of hindrances thrown in 


LECTURE V. 


189 


the way of our unlimited accumulation of property, 
or of our absolute disposal of it whether by gift or by 
will. 

Yet again, taking the mere ascendancy of the 
many or the few to be our object, without looking 
any farther, yet there arises a most important 
question, how many we comprehend in our division 
of many and few. Do w T e mean the many and the 
few of all the human beings within our territory, or 
of all the freemen, or of all the sovereign state as op¬ 
posed to its provinces, or of all the full citizens as op¬ 
posed to half citizens and sojourners ? According as 
we mean either the one or the other, the same party 
may be popular or antipopular: Are the southern 
states of the North-American union then to be re¬ 
garded as democratical or as oligarchical ? In the old 
constitution of Switzerland what was the canton of 
Uri, as we regard it either with or without its Italian 
bailiwicks ? In Spanish America what would have 
been a Creole democracy, as we either forgot or re¬ 
membered the existence of the men of colour ? So 
that our very principle of the mere ascendancy of the 
few or the many becomes complicated; and we very 
often regard a government as popular when it might 
with justice in another respect be called anti¬ 
popular. 

Thus regarding the contests of Europe simply in 
a political light and as they affect one single political 
question, that of the ascendancy of the many or the 
few, we do not find it easy to judge of them. Let 
us carry this on a little farther. Say that we do not 


190 


LECTURE V. 


regard the mere machinery of governments but their 
results; we value that most which is best administered, 
and most promotes the good of the nation; our views 
are not so much popular, as liberal. Have we arrived 
therefore at a greater simplification of the question ? 
Shall we as liberal men agree in regarding the same 
government as deserving of our support or our oppo¬ 
sition ? Scarcely, I think, unless we are first agreed 
as to what the good of the nation is. The ancient 
commonwealths, for the most part, discouraged trade 
and manufactures as compared with agriculture. 
Were these governments promoting the public good, 
or no ? Other nations have followed a different 
course, have encouraged trade and rejoiced in 
the growing wealth and comforts of their people. 
These in their turn are denounced by the principles 
and practice of others, who dread above all things 
the introduction of luxury. Again, we attach great 
importance to the cultivation of art and science; 
to all humanizing amusements; music, the theatre, 
dancing, &c. But when Lavoisier pleaded for his 
life to the French government of 1793, he was told 
that the republic had no need of chemists; the 
Roman senate expelled the rhetoricians from Rome; 
the early government of the state of Connecticut, one 
of the freest of commonwealths, would tolerate no pub¬ 
lic amusements, least of all the theatre. I might in¬ 
stance other differences in matters of a still higher 
character: as, for example, with regard to the expe¬ 
diency of a severe penal code or a mild one; to the 
establishment of one religion, or the extending equal 


LECTURE V. 


191 


favour to all. We see that the good government of 
one man is the bad government of another; the best 
results, according to one man’s estimate, are in the 
eyes of his neighbour the most to be deprecated. 

Now all these different views are found in connex¬ 
ion with different views on questions purely political; 
so that the very same party may in some respects ad¬ 
vocate what we approve of, and in others follow what 
we most dislike; and farther it may often act incon¬ 
sistently with itself, and pursue its principles, thus 
mingled as they are, imperfectly, or even may seem 
to act at variance with them. What then are we 
to judge of it, when we are studying past history ; or 
how should we have to act, if a similar party were to 
exist in our own generation ? 

Such, we see, are the difficulties of our subject; 
and to illustrate them still farther, I will name one 
or two instances in which men may seem to have 
mistaken their own natural side, owing to the com¬ 
plicated character of actual parties; and from their 
keen perception of some one point, either as loving 
it or abhorring it, have for its sake renounced much 
that was congenial, or joined much that was unsuited 
to them. This was the case, I think, with the his¬ 
torian Hume. A man of his exceedingly enquiring 
and unrestrained mind, living in the midst of the 
eighteenth century, might have been expected to 
have espoused what is called the popular side in the 
great questions of English history, the side, in later 
language, of the movement. Yet we know that 
Hume’s leaning is the other way. Accidental causes 


192 


LECTURE V. 


may perhaps have contributed to this; the prejudice 
of an ingenious mind against the opinions which he 
found most prevalent around him; the resistance of 
a restless mind to the powers that be, as natural as 
implicit acquiescence in them is to an indolent mind. 
But the main cause apparently is to be sought in his 
abhorrence of puritanism, alike repugnant to him in 
its good and its evil. His subtle and active mind 
could not bear its narrowness and bigotry, his careless 
and epicurean temper had no sympathy with its 
earnestness and devotion. The popular cause in our 
great civil contests was in his eyes the cause of fana¬ 
ticism ; and where he saw fanaticism he saw that 
from which his whole nature recoiled, as the greatest 
of all conceivable evils. 

I have spoken of the popular party in our great 
civil contest as being in modern language the party 
of the movement. Yet it would be a mistake to 
suppose that a popular party and a movement party 
are always synonymous. A movement party is a 
very indefinite expression, applicable equally to very 
different tilings. It includes equally those who move 
with a clearly apprehended object, aware of the evil 
which they are leaving, and of the good towards 
which they are tending; and those who move from 
an impulse of intolerable suffering in their actual 
state, but are going they know not whither; and 
those who would move from mere restlessness ; and 
those, lastly, who move as the instruments of a 
power which they serve unconsciously, altering the 
state of the world while they are thinking only of 


LECTURE V. 


193 


some object of personal ambition. In this latter 
sense Philip of Macedon belonged to the party of 
the movement, while Demosthenes would have kept 
Greece in her old relations. We see in this last in¬ 
stance the popular party and the movement party 
directly opposed to one another, accidentally, how¬ 
ever, as their coincidence also is accidental. We 
cannot but see that the change which Philip wrought, 
caring only for his personal objects, was in fact an 
onward step in the scheme of God’s providence, in¬ 
volving as it did that great spread of the Greek race 
and language over Asia, which was to serve such 
high purposes hereafter. To this Demosthenes was 
opposed; his object being only to maintain the old 
independence of Greece, and the old liberty and 
glory of Athens. A hundred years earlier, Pericles, 
heading the same political party, if we look only to 
the political relations of Athens abroad and at home, 
had also headed the party of the movement; new 
dominion, new wealth, new glory, new arts, and a 
new philosophy, every thing in Pericles and his ad¬ 
ministration was a going onward from what had ex¬ 
isted before. So again, to take our examples from 
modern times, the great religious movement in Eng¬ 
land at the Reformation was quite unconnected with 
popular principles in politics; and the same was the 
case in France in the wars of the League. The 
popular party in France, so far as either of the con¬ 
tending parties deserved that name, was opposed to 
Henry the Fourth, and in favour of the house of 
Guise. The burghers of Paris were as zealously at- 

o 


194 


LECTURE V. 


tached to the Holy Catholic League as those of 
London, sixty years later, were devoted to the So¬ 
lemn League and Covenant. The great movement, 
therefore, of the world is often wholly unconnected 
with the relations of the popular and antipopular 
parties in any one particular state, it may be favoured 
or resisted by either of them. 

Farther still, the mere change of time and circum¬ 
stances may alter the character of the same party 
without any change on its own part: its triumph 
may be at one time an evil, and at another time a 
good. This is owing to a truth which should never 
be forgotten in all political enquiries, that govern¬ 
ment is wholly relative; and that there is and can 
be no such thing as the best government absolutely, 
suited to all periods and to all countries. It is a 
fatal error in all political questions to mistake the 
clock ; to fancy that it is still forenoon, when the 
sun is westering; that it is early morning, when the 
sun has already mounted high in the heavens. No 
instance of this importance of reading the clock 
aright can be more instructive, than the great quarrel 
ordinarily known as that of the Guelfs and Ghibelins. 
I may remind you that these were respectively the 
parties which embraced the papal and the imperial 
cause in the struggle between these two powers in 
Italy and Germany from the eleventh century on¬ 
wards to the fourteenth. Here, as in all other actual 
contests, a great variety of principles and passions 
and instincts, so to speak, were intermingled; we 
must not suppose that it was any thing like a pure 


LECTURE V. 


195 


struggle on what may be called the distinguishing 
principle of the Guelf or Ghibelin cause. But the 
principle in itself was this ; whether the papal or the 
imperial, in other words, the sacerdotal or the regal 
power, was to be accounted the greater. Now con¬ 
ceive the papal power to be the representative of what 
is moral and spiritual, and the imperial power to re¬ 
present only what is external and physical; conceive 
the first to express the ideas of responsibility to God 
and paternal care and guidance, while the other was 
the mere embodying of selfish might, like the old 
Greek tyrannies; and who can do other than wish 
success to the papal cause ? who can help being with 
all his heart a Guelf? But in the early part of the 
struggle this was to a great degree the state of it; the 
pope stood in the place of the church, the emperor 
was a merely worldly despot, corrupt and arbitrary. 
But conceive, on the other hand, the papacy to be¬ 
come the representative of superstition, and of spi¬ 
ritual tyranny, while the imperial power was the ex¬ 
pression and voice of law; that the emperor stood in 
the place of the church, and the pope was the mere 
priest, the church’s worst enemy ; and this was ac¬ 
tually the form which the contest between the sacer¬ 
dotal and regal powers assumed at a later period; 
then our sympathies are changed, and we become no 
less zealously Ghibelin than we before were Guelf. 
Now so far at least as the papal power was con¬ 
cerned, the change was not in it, but in outward cir¬ 
cumstances. In the beginning of the dispute the 
papal claims were no less excessive than they became 

o 2 


196 


LECTURE V. 


afterwards, all the notions of priestly power were to 
be found in them, if not fully developed yet virtually. 
But these claims are harmless when the church is 
asleep or inactive, except so far as they tend to pro¬ 
long the sleep and inactivity. Setting aside this 
consideration, and supposing a state of ignorance and 
torpor not produced by the papacy, and likely to 
exist for a long time to come from other causes in¬ 
dependent of the papacy’s control, and then the papal 
dominion may be no more than the natural and law¬ 
ful authority of mature age over childhood, of the 
teacher over him who needs to be taught, of those 
who understand what Christianity is, over those who, 
professing to be Christians, yet know not what their 
principles are. But so soon as the child grew up into 
the man, that the sleeper was awakened, the inactive 
roused, the Christian taught to know his privileges 
and his duties; then the church being competent to 
do its own work, the claim of the pope to stand in 
its place became impertinent; and when that claim 
was urged as one of divine right, for all times and 
circumstances, and men were required to acknow¬ 
ledge its validity, then having become as useless and 
mischievous practically, as it w r as and always had 
been false theoretically, it was rejected as it de¬ 
served to be, and was considered amongst the great¬ 
est obstacles to truth and to goodness. 

This inattention to altered circumstances, which 
would make us be Guelfs in the sixteenth or seven- 
teenth centuries because the Guelf cause had been 
right in the eleventh or twelfth, is a fault of most 


LECTURE V. 


197 


universal application in all political questions, and 
is often most seriously mischievous. It is deeply 
seated in human nature, being in fact no other than 
an exemplification of the force of habit. It is like 
the case of a settler landing in a country overrun 
with wood and undrained, and visited therefore by 
excessive falls of rain. The evil of wet and damp 
and closeness is besetting him on every side; he 
clears away the woods, and he drains his land, and 
he by doing so mends both his climate and his own 
condition. Encouraged by his success he perseveres 
in his system; clearing a country is with him sy¬ 
nonymous with making it fertile and habitable; and 
he levels or rather sets fire to his forests without 
mercy. Meanwhile the tide is turned without his 
observing it; he has already cleared enough, and 
every additional clearance is a mischief; damp and 
wet are no longer the evils most to be dreaded, but 
excessive drought. The rains do not fall in suf¬ 
ficient quantity; the springs become low, the rivers 
become less and less fitted for navigation. Yet 
habit blinds him for a long while to the real state of 
the case; and he continues to encourage a coming 
mischief in his dread of one that is become obsolete. 
We have been long making progress on our present 
tack, yet -if we do not go about now, we shall run 
ashore. Consider the popular feeling at this moment 
against capital punishments; what is it but continu¬ 
ing to burn the woods, when the country actually 
wants shade and moisture. Year after year men 
talked of the severity of the penal code, and 


198 


LECTURE V. 


struggled against it in vain. The feeling became 
stronger and stronger, and at last effected all and 
more than all which it had at first vainly demanded; 
yet still from mere habit it pursues its course, no 
longer to the restraining of legal cruelty but to the 
injury of innocence and the encouragement of crime; 
and encouraging that worse evil, a sympathy with 
wickedness justly punished, rather than with the law, 
whether of God or man, unjustly violated. So men 
have continued to cry out against the power of the 
crown after the crown had been shackled hand and 
foot; and to express the greatest dread of popular 
violence, long after that violence was exhausted, and 
the antipopular party was not only rallied, but had 
turned the tide of battle, and was victoriously press¬ 
ing upon its enemy. 

I am not afraid after having gone thus far, to 
mention one consideration more, which, however over 
nice it may seem to some, appears to me really deserving 
to be taken into account. I mean that although the 
danger from any party in our own particular contest 
may seem to be at an end, and our alarms are begin¬ 
ning to be transferred to the opposite party, yet it is 
air important modification of the case, if in other 
countries the party which with us has just ceased to 
be formidable is still entirely predominant, and no 
opposition to it seems to be in existence. This 
would seem to shew that the main current of our 
times is still setting in that direction, and that the 
danger is still where we at first apprehended it; 
although in our own particular country, a local cross 


LECTURE V. 


199 


current may seem to indicate the contrary. For 
example, any excesses of the popular party in England 
in 1642 and the subsequent years, were much less 
dangerous, because the same party in other parts of 
Europe was so completely powerless; whereas in 
later years the triumph, first of the Americans and 
afterwards of the French Revolution, would make an 
essential difference in the strength of popular princi¬ 
ples in the world generally, and therefore would 
make their excess in any one particular country more 
really formidable. 

If we take into consideration all that has been 
hitherto said, and remember besides how much 
national questions have been mixed up with those of 
a political or religious character, to say nothing of 
commercial or economical interests, or of the 
anomalies of individual caprice or passion, we shall 
have some notion of the difficulty of our task to 
analyse the internal history of the last three centuries. 
And I have said nothing of philosophy, and nothing 
of religion, both of which have been very influential 
causes of action, and thus tend to complicate the 
subject still farther. Let us now see how far it is 
possible to separate a little this perplexed mass, and 
to arrive at some distinct views of the course of 
events and of opinions. 

In order to do this, the most effectual way perhaps 
will be to select some one particular country, and 
make its internal history the subject of an analysis. 
But I should wish it to be understood that I am 
offering rather a specimen of the method to be pur- 


200 


LECTURE V. 


sued in analyzing history, than pretending to execute 
the analysis completely. In fact if there were no 
other obstacles in the way of such a complete work, 
the limits of these lectures would alone render it im¬ 
practicable. And therefore if any of my hearers 
notice great omissions in the following sketch, he 
may suppose, at least in many instances, that they 
are made advisedly, that I am not attempting a com¬ 
plete historical view, but only exhibiting, in some 
very familiar instances, what I believe to be the 
method of studying internal history to the greatest 
advantage. 

Availing myself then of the division which I have 
noticed above, and assuming for our present purposes 
that the three last centuries may be divided into two 
periods, the one of religious, the other of political 
movement, I will now endeavour to offer a specimen 
of the analysis of internal history, taking for my 
subject these two periods successively, as far as regards 
our own country; and beginning therefore with the 
sixteenth century. 

It does not appear to me that there was at the 
beginning of this century any thing in England 
which deserves to be called either a political or a re¬ 
ligious party. There were changes at work no doubt, 
social changes going on imperceptibly which prepared 
the way for the developement of parties hereafter; 
but the parties themselves were not yet in existence. 
There was no party to assert the right of any rival 
claimant to the throne, there was no question stirring 
between the king and the nobility, or between the 


LECTURE V. 


201 


king and the commons, or between the nobility and 
commons. A more tranquil state of things politically 
could not well be found. 

So it was also religiously. The great schism of 
the rival popes had been long settled, and Wickliffe’s 
doctrines, although they could never have become 
extinct, did not gain strength visibly ; and those who 
held them were in no condition to form a party 
against the prevailing church doctrines or government. 
We start therefore upon our enquiry, with the whole 
matter of it before us, nothing of it has been already 
begun. 

Neither do I think that any thing properly to be 
called a party shewed itself till the reign of Eliza¬ 
beth. I do not mean to deny that Cranmer and 
Gardiner, the Seymours and the Howards, may have 
had their adherents and their enemies, principally 
amongst those who were attached on the one hand 
to the Reformation, and on the other hand to the 
system which was being reformed. So again there 
were insurrections both in Henry the Eighth’s reign 
and in Edward the Sixth’s against the measures of 
the government, when it was assailing the ancient 
system. But none of these things seem to have had 
sufficient consistence or permanence to entitle them 
to the name of national parties. At any rate the 
reign of Elizabeth witnessed them in a much more 
formed state, and here therefore we will consider 
them. 

Elizabeth ascended the throne in the year 1558; 
Charles the Fifth had died about two months before 


202 


LECTURE V. 


her accession; Henry the Second was still reign¬ 
ing. Paul the Fourth, John Peter. Caraffa, had 
been pope for the last three years : the Reform¬ 
ation, dating from Luther’s first preaching, was 
now about forty years old: the council of Trent was 
suspended; its third and final period began under 
Pius the Fourth, four years later. The Reformation 
after having been established fully in England under 
Edward the Sixth, and again completely overthrown 
under Mary, was now once more triumphant. But 
its friends were divided amongst themselves, and we 
can now trace two active and visible parties in 
England, with a third no longer combating in its 
own name in the front of the battle, but still power¬ 
ful, and transferring some of its principles to one of 
the other two parties, whose triumph might possibly 
lead the way hereafter to its own. These three 
parties were the favourers of the church system as 
actually established, those who wished to reform it 
still more, and those who wished to undo what had 
been done to it already. But the Roman Catholics, 
who formed this last party, could not, as I have said, 
fight their battle openly, as both the government and 
the mass of the nation were against them. 

It does not appear that these parties had as yet 
assumed a directly political form. They as yet in¬ 
volved no struggle between the crown and the parlia¬ 
ment, or between the government and the nation. 
Of course they contained in them certain political 
tendencies, which were afterwards developed suffi¬ 
ciently ; but they were as yet, in their form, of a reli- 


LECTURE V. 


203 

gious, or at least of an ecclesiastical character. And 
like all other parties they represented each no one 
single principle but several; and mixed with prin¬ 
ciples, a variety of interests and passions besides. 

1st. The friends or supporters of the existing 
church system, however different in other respects, 
agreed in one great point; namely, in the exclusion 
of the papal power, and in asserting the national in¬ 
dependence in things ecclesiastical and spiritual. 
Farther, they agreed in the main in regarding the 
national voice, whose independence they maintained, 
as expressed by the national sovereign, in recognising 
the king or queen as the head of the church. In 
other matters they differed greatly, as was unavoid¬ 
able; for thus far the most worldly men and the 
most religious might go along with each other, al¬ 
though in other things most at variance. It may be 
safely said that this point of the national religious in¬ 
dependence, expressed by the royal supremacy, was 
the main bond which held Elizabeth to the Reform¬ 
ation; not that she was averse to it religiously, at 
least in its principal points; but that this threw her 
at once into its arms: she preferred that system 
which made her a queen altogether, to that which 
subjected her, in the most important of all human 
concerns, to the authority of an Italian priest. Eliza¬ 
beth’s own views were shared by a large portion of 
her people; they utterly abhorred the papal supre¬ 
macy, with an English feeling quite as much as a re¬ 
ligious one; it is not clear that they would have ab¬ 
horred it equally had the papal see been removed tor 


204 


LECTURE V. 


ever from Rome to Canterbury, and the pope been 
necessarily an Englishman. But in proportion as reli¬ 
gious questions had come to engage men’s minds 
more generally, so they became desirous to have the 
power of deciding them for themselves. And no 
doubt mere political feelings had a great deal to do 
with the matter; the papacy was a government con¬ 
stantly varying in its foreign policy; French influence 
was at one time predominant at Rome, Spanish in¬ 
fluence at another; but English influence was never 
powerful; and Englishmen did not wish to be in any 
degree subject to an authority which might be acting 
in the interests of their rivals or their enemies. 

Again, the existing church system as opposed to 
the old one was upheld by a great number of persons 
throughout the country, because it was the relaxation 
of an irksome control. The Roman Catholic system, 
when enforced, does undoubtedly interfere consider¬ 
ably with men’s liberty of thought and action. Its 
ritual and ceremonial ordinances are very numerous, 
and may be compared to the minute details of mili¬ 
tary discipline in the bondage which they are felt to 
impose. Its requiring auricular confession, and its 
assumed right of exercising over men’s minds and 
studies the same absolute authority which a parent 
claims over the mind and pursuits of a young child, 
were unendurable at a moment when the burst of 
mental vigour in England was so extraordinary as it 
was in the reign of Elizabeth. Let any man read 
Shakespeare and the other great dramatists of the 
period, and he will observe nothing more remarkable 


LECTURE V. 


205 


in them than their extreme freedom, I may almost 
call it, their license of thought. These dramatists 
were entirely men of the people; and other writers 
of the day belonging' to the same class, shew no less 
the same tendency. Men of various ranks and 
degrees, from the highest nobility to the humblest of 
that middle class which was now daily growing in 
numbers and importance, all loving their liberty of 
thought and action in their several ways, were averse 
to the return of a system, which, whenever it was en¬ 
forced, as it now seemed likely to be, exercised a con¬ 
stant control over both. 

To be classed in the same party, and yet very dif¬ 
ferent in themselves from the division of it just 
noticed, were all those who out of sincere and con¬ 
scientious feeling concurred heartily in the church 
system as it was established in the reign of Edward 
the Sixth, and from various motives were disposed to 
rest contented in it. Some thinking it a matter of 
wisdom and charity not to go farther from the old 
system than was necessary; some also, and this is a 
natural feeling in the leaders of a reforming party, 
esteeming very much what they had done already, 
and yielding to that desire of our nature which after 
work well done longs to rest. And these took it ill 
when they were told to think nothing accomplished, 
till they should have accomplished every thing; it 
seemed like an unthankful disparagement of their 
past efforts, to be requiring of them immediately to 
exert themselves farther. Nor was it possible for the 
bishops and others of the high clergy to escape the 


206 


lecture V. 


influence of professional feelings; which would plead 
in favour of a system which, however much it sub¬ 
jected them to the control of the crown, gave them 
much authority and dignity with respect to the in¬ 
ferior clergy and to the laity. 

2ndly. Distinct from and soon to be strongly op¬ 
posed to this first party, was the party which wished 
to carry the Reformation farther; that party which 
is commonly known by the name of Puritan. This 
was composed of less different elements than the 
church party, from the nature of the case; although 
in it too differences were in process of time observ¬ 
able. But at first it contained only those who in 
their main principle were agreed: they deemed the 
old church system to be utterly bad, so bad as to 
have defiled whatever it had touched, even things in 
their own nature indifferent; they wished therefore to 
reform it utterly, and abandoning every thing of man’s 
device, to adopt nothing either in church doctrine or 
discipline which was not authorized directly by God’s 
word. Being men of exceeding zeal and of a most 
stirring nature, they were anxious to do the work ef¬ 
fectually, and would listen to no considerations which 
pleaded for compromise or for delay. 

Familiarity with and love of the foreign pro- 
testant churches on the one hand, especially that of 
Geneva; an extreme veneration for what they found 
in the letter of the Scripture, and probably also 
certain notions of good and free government which 
the actual state of the English monarchy could not 
but shock ; disposed the puritans to regard with 


LECTURE V. 


207 


dislike the principle of the royal supremacy. They 
saw that practically the arbitrary power which they 
abhorred in the pope had been transferred in the 
lump to the queen ; they saw no such thing in the 
Christian church, as exhibited in the Scriptures; 
neither could they find there, as they thought, any 
like the English episcopacy and hierarchy; but the 
government of the church vested in a body of elders, 
and these not all members of the order of the clergy. 
What they thought they found in the Scriptures 
they believed to be of divine authority, not only 
when it was first instituted, but for ever; and they 
wished therefore to substitute for the royal supremacy 
and hierarchy of the existing English church, that 
church government which alone, as they were per¬ 
suaded, was ordained by God himself. 

Furthermore, as men to whom religious questions 
were a great reality, and a matter of the deepest 
personal interest, they were in the highest degree 
impatient of all which seemed to them formalism. 
They conceived that amidst the prevailing ignorance 
and indifference on religious matters, a liturgical 
service was of much less consequence than a stirring 
preaching of the gospel; they complained, therefore, 
of the evil of an unpreaching ministry ; for the mass 
of the clergy were so ignorant that they were unable, 
or could not be trusted to preach, and the homilies 
had been set forth by authority to remedy, as far as 
might be, this defect. The puritans said that the 
liturgy might become a mere form both in the 
minister and in the congregation, if it were not ac- 


208 


LECTURE V. 


companied by an effective preaching; the minister in 
their view was not to be the mere instrument of the 
church services, but to be useful to the people by his 
own personal gifts; an ignorant or utterly vicious 
man might read a form prescribed by others ; they 
wanted a man who should believe, and must there¬ 
fore speak, not the words of others, but those of his 
own convictions and affections. 

There was in the principles of the puritans nothing 
of philosophy, either in the good sense of the word 
or the bad. And it is also most unjust to charge 
them with irreverence or want of humility. They 
received the Scriptures as God’s word, and they 
followed them implicitly. Neither do they seem 
chargeable with establishing nice distinctions in order 
to evade their obvious meaning ; their fault seems 
rather to have lien in the other extreme; they 
acquiesced in the obvious and literal meaning too 
unhesitatingly. Nor yet were they wanting in respect 
for all human authority, as trusting in their own 
wisdom and piety only. On the contrary, the 
decisions of the earlier church with respect to the 
great Christian doctrines, they received without 
questioning: they by no means took the Scriptures 
into their hands, and sat down to make a new creed 
of their own out of them. They disregarded the 
church only where the church departed from the 
obvious sense of Scripture; I do not say the true 
sense, but the obvious one. The difference as to 
their moral character is considerable: because he 
who maintains another than the obvious sense of 


LECTURE V. 


209 


Scripture against other men, may indeed be perfectly 
right, but he is liable to the charge, whether grave 
or frivolous as it may be, of preferring his own in- - 
terpretation to that of the church. But maintaining 
the obvious sense, even if it be the wrong one, he 
can hardly be charged himself with arrogance; he 
may with greater plausibility retort the charge on his 
opponents, that they are substituting the devices of 
their own ingenuity for the plain sense of the word 
of God. 

To say that the puritans were wanting in humility 
because they did not acquiesce in the state of things 
which they found around them, is a mere extrava¬ 
gance arising out of a total misapprehension of the 
nature of humility, and of the merits of the feeling 
of veneration. All earnestness and depth of charac¬ 
ter is incompatible with such a notion of humility, 

A man deeply penetrated with some great truth, and 
compelled as it were to obey it, cannot listen to 
every one who may be indifferent to it or opposed to 
it. There is a voice to which he already owes 
obedience, which he serves with the humblest devo¬ 
tion, which he worships with the most intense venera¬ 
tion. It is not that such feelings are dead in him, 
but that he has bestowed them on one object and 
they are claimed for another. To which they are 
most due is a question of justice; he may be wrong 
in his decision, and his worship may be idolatrous; 
but so also may be the worship which his opponents 
call upon him to render. If indeed it can be shewn 
that a man admires and reverences nothing, he may 

p 


210 


LECTURE V. 


justly be taxed with want of humility; but this is 
at variance with the very notion of an earnest charac¬ 
ter ; for its earnestness consists in its devotion to 
some one object, as opposed to a proud or con¬ 
temptuous indifference. But if it be meant that 
reverence in itself is good, so that the more objects 
of veneration we have, the better is our character, 
this is to confound the essential difference between 
veneration and love. The excellence of love is its 
universality; we are told that even the highest 
object of all cannot be loved, if inferior objects are 
hated. And with some exaggeration in the expres¬ 
sion, we may admit the truth of Coleridge’s lines, 

He prayeth well, who loveth well 

Both man and bird and beast ; 

insomuch that if we were to hear of a man sacrificing 

© 

even his life to save that of an animal, we could not 
help admiring him. But the excellence of veneration 
consists purely in its being fixed upon a worthy 
object; when felt indiscriminately it is idolatry or 
insanity. To tax any one therefore with want of 
reverence because he pays no respect to what w T e 
venerate, is either irrelevant or is a mere confusion. 
The fact, so far as it is true, is no reproach but an 
honour; because to reverence all persons and all 
things is absolutely wrong: reverence shewn to that 
which does not deserve it, is no virtue, no, nor even 
an amiable weakness, but a plain folly and sin. But 
if it be meant that he is wanting in proper reverence, 
not respecting what is really to be respected, that is 
assuming the whole question at issue, because what 


LECTURE V. 


211 


we call divine lie calls an idol; and as supposing that 
we are in the right, we are bound to fall down and 
worship, so, supposing him to be in the right, he is 
no less bound to pull it to the ground and destroy it. 

I have said thus much not only to do justice to 
the puritans, but because this charge of want of hu¬ 
mility is one frequently brought by weaker and baser 
minds against the stronger and nobler; not seldom 
by those who are at once arrogant and indifferent, 
against those who are in truth as humble as they are 
zealous. But returning to our immediate subject, 
we see that the puritans united in themselves two 
points which gave to their party a double appear¬ 
ance ; and at a later period, when the union between 
the two was no longer believed in, they excited in 
the very same minds a mingled feeling; admiration 
as far as regarded one point, alienation as regarded 
the other. The puritans wished to alter the exist¬ 
ing church system for one which they believed to be 
freer and better; and so far they resembled a com¬ 
mon popular party: but inasmuch as in this and all 
other matters their great principle was, conformity 
to the Scripture, and they pushed this to an extrava¬ 
gant excess, because their interpretation of Scripture 
was continually faulty, there w 7 as, together with their 
free political spirit, a narrow spirit in things re¬ 
ligious, which shocked not only the popular party of 
the succeeding age, but many even in their own day, 
who politically entertained opinions far narrower 
than theirs. In Elizabeth’s reign, however, they 
had scarcely begun to form a political party; their 

p 2 


212 


LECTURE V. 


views affected the church government only, and con¬ 
templated no alteration in the spirit of the mon¬ 
archy; although it was evident, that if the crown 
continued to resist their efforts in church matters, 
they would end by resisting not only its ecclesias¬ 
tical supremacy, but its actual ascendancy in the 
constitution altogether. 

3rd. The Roman Catholic party could not, as I 
have said, act openly in their own name, because 
their system had been put down by law; and, as 
they were at present regarded as far worse in them¬ 
selves and far more dangerous than the puritans, all 
their movements and all expressions of their opinions 
were restrained with greater severity. Denying like 
the puritans the royal supremacy, and exposed for so 
doing to the heaviest penalties, their language some¬ 
times assumed a strong political character, and they 
spoke freely of the duty of disobeying and deposing 
those tyrannical princes, on whom the church by the 
pope’s voice had already pronounced its sentence of 
condemnation. It was the language of the old Guelf 
party, which some even to this hour regard as popu¬ 
lar and liberal. But to oppose a lighter tyranny in 
the name of a heavier cannot be to serve the cause 
of good government; and the moral and spiritual 
dominion of the papacy was now become the great 
evil of the world, as it was pressing upon those parts 
of man’s nature which were stirring for themselves, 
and whose silence would be no longer sleep but 
death. 

The language of the Roman catholics did not 


LECTURE V. 


213 


mislead the mass of the English nation, but only 
made themselves more odious. The serpent’s wis¬ 
dom of Elizabeth cannot be denied by the bitterest 
of her enemies. With incomparable ability she 
made herself personally the darling of her people 
from the first year of her reign to the last. Her 
behaviour when she passed through the city in state 
on the day preceding her coronation, or when thirty 
years afterwards she visited and harangued her troops 
at Tilbury, or when at the very end of her reign she 
granted so gracefully the petition of the house of 
commons against monopolies, was all of the same 
character; the frank and gracious and noble bearing 
of a sovereign feeling herself at once beloved and re¬ 
spected, knowing the greatness of her place, and 
sincerely, if not habitually, appreciating its duties. 
Her personal qualities made her dear to her subjects, 
and assisted them in seeing clearly that her cause 
and theirs were one. Conspiracy at home and open 
war abroad, the excommunications of Rome, the 
Armadas of Spain, the assassination plots of the 
catholics, only bound her people’s love to her more 
firmly. Her arbitrary acts, and still more arbitrary 
language, the severities, illegalities, and cruelties of 
her government towards the parties who opposed 
her, the people at large forgot or approved of. No¬ 
thing was unjust, nothing was cruel, against the 
enemies of one whom the nation so loved; the al¬ 
most universal voice of England called for the death 
of Mary Stuart, because the people believed her life 
to be incompatible with the safety of their beloved 


214 


LECTURE V. 


queen. Whilst Elizabeth lived, political parties, pro¬ 
perly so called, were incapable of existing; it was 
the whole English nation on one side, and on the 
other a few conspirators. 

But another scene was preparing, and when her 
successor came to the throne, the state of parties 
assumed a different aspect; and political elements 
were added to the religious, rivalling or surpassing 
them in the interest which they awakened. This 
later stage of what I have called the religious move¬ 
ment of modern English history will be considered 
in the following lecture. 


LECTURE VI. 


Our sketch of the English part of what I have 
called the religious movement of modern Europe has 
now arrived at the beginning of the seventeenth 
century. And I have said that the several parties 
as hitherto developed have been religious rather than 
political, but that they were soon to become political 
also. I have used these words “religious” and 
“ political ” in their common acceptation for the sake 
of convenience; but it is quite necessary to observe 
the confusions which attend this use of them, as well 
as of the kindred words “ church ” and “ state,” 
“ spiritual ” and “ secular,” confusions of no slight 
importance, and perpetually tending, as I think, to 
perplex our notions of the whole matter to which 
the words relate. 

I have called the puritans in the sixteenth century 
a religious party rather than a political, because it 
was the government of the church and not of the 
state, to use again the common language, which they 
were attempting to alter; the government by bishops, 


21G 


LECTURE VI. 


archdeacons, &c., under the royal supremacy, not 
the government by king, lords, and commons. But 
if we examine the case a little more closely, we shall 
find that in strictness they were a political party, and 
that the changes which they wanted to introduce 
were political; political, it may be said, even more 
than religious, if we apprehend the distinction in¬ 
volved in these words more accurately than seems to 
be done by the common usage of them. 

I shall not, I trust, be suspected of wishing merely 
to bring forward a startling paradox, when I say that 
in speaking of Christianity the word church is rather 
to be used as distinct from religion than as synonym¬ 
ous with it, and that it belongs in great part to 
another set of ideas, relating to things which we call 
political. Religion expresses the relations of man to 
God, setting aside our relations to other men: the 
church expresses our relations to God in and through 
our relations to other men : the state, in popular 
language, expresses our relations to other men with¬ 
out reference to our relations to God : but I have 
always thought that this notion is in fact atheistic, 
and that the truer notion would be that the state at 
least expresses our relations to other men according 
to God’s ordinance, that is, in some degree including 
our relation to God. However, without insisting on 
this, we will allow that the term religion may have 
a meaning without at all considering our relations to 
other men, and that the word state may have a 
meaning without at all considering our relations to 
God; not its perfect meaning, but a meaning; 


LECTURE VL 


217 


whereas the word “ church ” necessarily comprehends 
both : we cannot attach any sense to it without con¬ 
ceiving of it as related to God, and involving also 
the relations of men to one another. It stands, 
therefore, according to this view of it, as the union 
of the two ideas of religion and the state, comprising 
necessarily in itself the essential points of both the 
others; and as being such, all church questions may 
be said to be both religious and political; although 
in some the religious element may be predominant, 
and in others the political, almost to the absorption 
of the other. 

Now questions of church government may appear 
clearly to be predominantly political; that is, as 
regarding the relations of the members of the church 
to one another, whether one shall govern the rest, or 
the few the many, or the many themselves : and the 
arguments which bear upon all these points in 
societies merely political might seem the arguments 
which should decide them here. But two other con¬ 
siderations are here to be added ; one, that in the 
opinion of many persons of opposite parties, all such 
arguments are barred by God’s having expressly com¬ 
manded a particular form of government; so that 
instead of the general question, what is the best 
form of government under such and such circum¬ 
stances, we have another, what is the particular form 
commanded by God as the best under all circum¬ 
stances. This is one consideration, and according to 
this, it might no doubt happen that persons of the 
most opposite political opinions might concur in 


218 


LECTURE VI. 


desiring the very same form of church government, 
simply as that which God had commanded. This is 
possible, and in individual cases I do not doubt that 
it has often actually happened. But as the question, 
what is the particular form divinely commanded, is 
open to manifold doubts, to say nothing of the farther 
question, “ whether any particular form has been 
commanded or no; ” so practically amongst actual 
parties, men’s opinions and feelings, political and 
others, have really influenced them in deciding the 
question of fact, and they have actually maintained 
one form or another to be the form divinely com¬ 
manded, according to their firm belief of its superior 
excellence, or their sense of the actual evils of other 
forms, or their instinctive feeling in favour of what 
was established and ancient. And so we really 
should thus far reclaim questions on church govern¬ 
ment to the dominion of political questions ; political 
or moral considerations having really for the most 
part been the springs of the opinions of the several 
parties respecting them. 

But I said that there were two considerations to 
be added, and I have as yet only mentioned one. 
The other is the belief entertained of the existence 
of a priesthood in Christianity, and this priesthood 
regulated by a divine law, and attached for ever to 
the offices which exercise government also. And 
this priesthood being, according to the opinion of 
those who believe in it, of infinite religious import¬ 
ance, the question of church government becomes 
in their view much more religious than political; 


LECTURE VI. 


219 


religious, not only in this sense, that church govern¬ 
ment, whether we may think it good or bad, must be 
tried simply by the matter of fact, whether it is the 
government ordained by God; but in another and 
stricter sense, that the priesthood implying also the 
government, and being necessary to every man’s 
spiritual welfare, not through the governing powers 
attached to it, but in its own direct priestly acts 
which are quite distinct from government, church 
government is directly a matter of religious import, 
and to depart from what God has ordained respecting 
it is not merely a breach of God’s commandments, 
but is an actual cutting off of that supply of spiritual 
strength by which alone we can be saved. So that 
in this view questions of church government, as in¬ 
volving more or less the priesthood also, must be pre¬ 
dominantly religious. 

Am I then contradicting myself, and were the 
parties of the sixteenth century purely religious, as 
I have called them religious in the popular sense of 
the word, and not at all, or scarcely at all political ? 
I think that the commonest reader of English his¬ 
tory will feel that they were political, and that I was 
right in calling them so ; where then are we to find 
the solution of the puzzle ? In two points, which I 
think are historically certain; first, that the con¬ 
troversy about episcopacy was not held of necessity 
to involve the question of the priesthood, because 
the priestly character was not thought to be vested 
exclusively in bishops, nor to be communicable only 
by them ; so that episcopacy might be after all a 


220 


LECTURE VI. 


point of government and not of priesthood: and 
secondly in this, that the reformed churches, and the 
church of England no less than the rest, laid no stress 
on the notion of a priesthood, and made it no part of 
their faith; so that questions of church government, 
when debated between protestants and protestants, 
were debated without reference to it, and as questions 
of government only. Whereas amongst Roman 
catholics, where the belief in a priesthood is at the 
bottom of the whole system, questions of church 
government have had no place, but the dispute has 
been De sacerdotio et imperio, respecting the limits 
of the church and the state ; for the church being 
supposed identical with, or rather to be merged in 
the priesthood, its own government of itself was 
fixed irrevocably ; and the important question was, 
how large a portion of human life could be saved 
from the grasp of this dominion, which was supposed 
to be divine, and yet by sad experience was felt also 
to be capable both of corruption and tyranny. So 
that there was no remedy but to separate the 
dominion of the state from that of the church as 
widely as possible, and to establish a distinction be¬ 
tween secular things and spiritual, that so the corrupt 
church might have only one portion of the man, and 
some other power, not subject to its control, might 
have the rest. 

Returning then to my original point, it is still, I 
think, tiue that the parties of the sixteenth century 
in England were in great measure political; inas¬ 
much as they disputed about points of church govern- 


LECTURE VI. 


221 


ment, without any reference to a supposed priest¬ 
hood ; and because even those who maintained that 
one or another form was to be preferred because it 
was of divine appointment, were influenced in their 
interpretation of the doubtful language of the Scrip¬ 
tures by their own strong persuasion of what that 
language could not but mean to say. But being 
political even as we have hitherto regarded them, 
the parties become so in a much higher degree when 
we remember that according to the theory of the 
English constitution in the sixteenth century, its 
church and its state were one. 

Whether this identification be right or wrong, is 
no part of my present business to decide; but the 
fact is perfectly indisputable. It does not depend 
merely on the language of the act which conferred 
the supremacy on Henry the Eighth, large and de¬ 
cisive as that language is. Nor on the large powers, 
and high precedence, ranking above all the bishops 
and archbishops, assigned to the king’s vicegerent in 
matters ecclesiastical, such vicegerent being a layman. 
Nor yet does it rest solely on the fact of Edward the 
Sixth issuing an office for the celebration of the 
communion purely by his own authority, with the 
advice of his uncle the protector Somerset, and 
others of his privy council, without the slightest 
mention of any consent or advice of any bishop or 
clerical person whatsoever; the king declaring in his 
preface that he knows what by God’s word is meet 
to be redressed, and that he purposes with God’s 


222 


LECTURE VI. 


grace to do it a . But it is proved by this, that every 
point in the doctrine, discipline, and ritual of our 
church, was settled by the authority of parliament: 
the Act of Uniformity of the first of Elizabeth, 
which fixed the liturgy and ordered its use in all 
churches, being passed by the queen, lords temporal, 
and commons only; the bishops being Roman catho¬ 
lics, and of course refusing to join in it; so that the 
very preamble of the act omits all mention of lords 
spiritual, and declares that it was enacted by the 
queen with the advice and consent of the lords and 
commons,' and by the authority of the same. And it 
is proved again by the language of the prayer for the 
church militant, where the king’s council and his 
ministers are undoubtedly regarded as being officers 
in the church by virtue of their offices in the state. 
This being the fact, recognised on all hands, church 
government was no light matter, but one which es¬ 
sentially involved in it the government of the state; 
and the disputing the queen’s supremacy was equi¬ 
valent to depriving her of one of the most important 
portions of her sovereignty, and committing half of 
the government of the nation to other hands. And 
therefore when James the first used his famous ex¬ 
pression of “ no bishop, no king,” he spoke exactly 

a See Edward the Sixth’s “ Order of the Communion,” “ im¬ 
printed at London by Richard Grafton, 1547,” and reprinted by 
Bishop Sparrow in his “ Collection of Articles, Injunctions, Ca¬ 
nons, Orders,” &c., and again, lately by Dr. Cardwell as an Ap- 
pendix to the Two Liturgies of Edward the Sixth. Oxford, 1841. 


LECTURE VI. 


223 


in the spirit of the notion that an aristocracy is a 
necessary condition of a monarchy, unless it be a 
pure despotism, military or otherwise; that where 
the people are free, if they have rejected an aristo¬ 
cracy, they will surely sooner or later reject a mon¬ 
archy also. 

But still, had Elizabeth’s successor been like her¬ 
self, the religious parties might have gone on for a 
long time without giving to their opposition a direct 
political form. Sir Francis Knollys, writing to Lord 
Burghley in January 1592, (1591, O.S.,) wonders 
that the queen should imagine “ that she is in as 
much danger of such as are called puritans as she is 
of the papists, and yet her majesty cannot be ignor¬ 
ant that the puritans are not able to change the 
government of the clergy, but only by petition at her 
majesty’s hands. And yet her majesty cannot do it, 
but she must call a parliament for it; and no act 
can pass thereof unless her majesty shall give her 
royal assent thereto.” a This shews that as yet no 
notion was entertained of parliament’s taking up the 
cause of itself, and pressing it against the crown; 
and indeed such was the mingled fear and love en¬ 
tertained for Elizabeth, that the mere notion of a 
strong party in parliament setting itself in opposition 
to her was altogether chimerical. But in the mean 
time the puritan party was gaining ground in the 
country; its supporters in parliament were continu¬ 
ally becoming more numerous; and instead of the 

a Queen Elizabeth and Her Times. Edited by T. Wright, Trinity 
College, Cambridge. London, 1838. Vol. i. p. 417. 


224 


LECTURE VI. 


most able, the most respected, and the most beloved 
of queens, the sovereign of England was now James 
the First. 

At one stroke the crown became placed in a new 
position. Not less adverse to the puritans than Eliza¬ 
beth had been, King James met with none of that 
enthusiastic loyalty from the mass of the people 
which in the late reign had softened the opposition 
of the puritans, and if it had not softened it would 
have rendered it harmless. He abandoned Eliza¬ 
beth’s foreign policy, as he was incapable of main¬ 
taining either the dignity or the popularity of her 
personal character. The spell which had stayed the 
spirit of political party was broken, and the waters 
whose swelling had been held back as it were by its 
potent influence, now took their natural course, and 
rose with astonishing rapidity. 

The most disastrous revolutions are produced by 
the extreme of physical want; the most happy, by 
wants of a moral kind, physical want being absent. 
There are many reasons why this should be so : and 
this amongst others, that extreme physical want is 
unnatural: it is a disease which cannot be shaken off 
without a violent and convulsive struggle. But 
moral and intellectual cravings are but a healthful 
symptom of vigorous life: before they were felt, no 
wrong was done in withholding their appointed food, 
and if it be given them when they demand it, all 
goes on naturally and happily. Nay, even where it 
is refused, and a struggle is the consequence, still the 
struggle is marked with much less of bitterness, for 


LECTURE VI. 


225 


men contending for political rights are not infuriated 
like those who are fighting for bread. Now at the 
beginning of the seventeenth century the craving for 
a more active share in the management of their own 
concerns was felt by a large portion of the English 
people. It had been suspended in Elizabeth’s reign 
owing to the general respect for her government, and 
the growing activity of the nation found its employ¬ 
ment in war, or in trade, or in writing; for the mass 
of writers in Elizabeth’s time was enormous. But 
when the government excited no respect, then the 
nation began to question with itself, why in the con¬ 
duct of its affairs such a government should be so 
much and itself so little. 

No imaginary constitution floated before the eyes 
of the popular party in parliament, as the object to¬ 
wards which all their efforts should be directed. 
Their feeling was indistinct, but yet they seem to 
have acted on a consciousness that the time was 
come wdien in the government of the country the in¬ 
fluence of the crown should be less, and that of the 
nation more. It appears to me that the particu¬ 
lar matters of dispute were altogether subordinate; 
the puritan members of parliament pressed for the 
reform of the church ; men who were keenly alive 
to the value of personal freedom, attacked arbitrary 
courts of justice, and the power of arbitrary im¬ 
prisonment ; those who cared for little else w r ere at 
least anxious to keep in their own hands the control 
over their own money. But in all the impulse w 7 as 
the same, to make the house of commons a reality. 

Q 


226 


LECTURE VI. 


Created in the midst of regal and aristocratical op¬ 
pression, and wonderfully preserved during the de¬ 
spotism of the Tudor princes with all its powers un¬ 
impaired because it had not attempted to exercise 
them unseasonably; an undoubted branch of the legis¬ 
lature,—the sole controller by law of the public tax¬ 
ation,—authorized even in its feeblest infancy to 
petition for the redress of national grievances and to 
impeach public delinquents in the name of the 
“ Commons of England,”—recognised as speaking 
with the voice of the nation when the nation could 
do no more than petition and complain, the house of 
commons spoke that same voice no less now, when 
the nation was grown up to manhood, and had the 
power to demand and to punish. 

The greater or less importance of a representative 
assembly is like the quicksilver in a barometer; it 
rises or falls according to causes external to itself; 
and is but an index exhibited in a palpable form, of 
the more or less powerful pressure of the popular at¬ 
mosphere. When the people at large are poor, de¬ 
pressed, and inactive, then their representatives 
faithfully express their weakness; nothing is so help¬ 
less as a house of commons, or a chamber of deputies, 
when their constituents are indifferent to or unable 
to support their efforts. But under opposite circum¬ 
stances an opposite result is inevitable; where the 
people are vigorous, powerful and determined, then- 
representatives, so long as they are believed to repre¬ 
sent them faithfully, cannot but wield a predominant 
influence. Naturally then and unavoidably did the 


LECTURE VI. 


227 


power of the house of commons grow in the seven¬ 
teenth century, because, as I have said, they spoke 
the voice of the nation, and the nation was now 
become strong. 

Under these circumstances there were now work¬ 
ing together in the same party many principles 
which, as we have seen, are sometimes perfectly 
distinct. For instance the popular principle, that the 
influence of many should not be overborne by that of 
one, was working side by side with the principle of 
movement, or the desire of carrying on the work of 
the Reformation to the farthest possible point, and 
not only the desire of completing the Reformation, 
but that of shaking off the manifold evils of the 
existing state of things both political and moral. Yet 
it is remarkable that the spirit of intellectual move¬ 
ment stood as it were hesitating which party it ought 
to join: and as the contest went on, it seemed rather 
to incline to that party which was most opposed to 
the political movement. This is a point in the state 
of English party in the seventeenth century which is 
well worth noticing, and we must endeavour to com¬ 
prehend it. 

We might think, a priori, that the spirit of politi¬ 
cal and that of intellectual, and that of religious 
movement, would go on together, each favouring and 
encouraging the other. But the spirit of intellectual 
movement differs from the other two in this, that it 
is comparatively one with which the mass of mankind 
have little sympathy. Political benefits all men can 
appreciate; and all good men, and a great many 

q 2 


228 


LECTURE VL 


more than we might well dare to call good, can ap¬ 
preciate also the value not of all, but of some reli¬ 
gious truth which to them may seem all : the way to 
obtain God’s favour and to worship Him aright, is a 
thing which great bodies of men can value, and be 
moved to the most determined efforts, if they fancy 
that they are hindered from attaining to it. But in¬ 
tellectual movement in itself is a thing which few 
care for. Political truth may be dear to them, so 
far as it affects their common well-being; and reli¬ 
gious truth so far as they may think it their duty to 
learn it; but truth abstractedly, and because it is 
truth, which is the object, I suppose, of the pure in¬ 
tellect, is to the mass of mankind a thing indifferent. 
Thus the workings of the intellect come even to be 
regarded with suspicion as unsettling: We have got, 
we say, what we want, and we are well contented 
with it; why should we be kept in perpetual rest¬ 
lessness, because you are searching after some new 
truths, which when found will compel us to derange 
the state of our minds in order to make room for 
them. Thus the democracy of Athens was afraid of 
and hated Socrates; and the poet who satirized 
Cleon, knew that Cleon’s partisans no less than his 
own aristocratical friends would sympathize with his 
satire, when directed against the philosophers. But 
if this hold in political matters, much more does it 
hold religiously. The two great parties of the 
Christian world have each their own standard of 
truth by which they try all things : Scripture on the 
one hand, the voice of the church on the other. To 


LECTURE VI. 


229 


both therefore the pure intellectual movement is not 
only unwelcome, but they dislike it. It will question 
what they will not allow to be questioned; it may 
arrive at conclusions which they would regard as im¬ 
pious. And therefore in an age of religious move¬ 
ment particularly, the spirit of intellectual move¬ 
ment soon finds itself proscribed rather than counte¬ 
nanced. 

But still there remains the question why it should 
have shrunk from the religious party which was aim¬ 
ing at reform rather than from that which was op¬ 
posed to it. And the explanation appears to be this. 
The reforming party held up Scripture in all things 
as their standard, and Scripture according to its most 
obvious interpretation. Thus in matters of practice, 
such as church government, ceremonial, &c., they al¬ 
lowed of no liberty; Scripture was to be the rule 
positively and negatively ; what was found in it was 
commanded; what it did not command was un¬ 
lawful. Again, in matters of faith, what the Scrip¬ 
ture taught was to be believed; believed actively, 
not submissively accepted. I instance the most 
startling points of Calvinism as an example of this. 
And this party knew no distinction of learned or 
unlearned, of priest or layman, of those who were 
to know the mysteries of the kingdom of God, and 
of those who were to receive the book sealed up, 
and believe that its contents were holy, because 
their teachers told them so. All having the full 
Christian privileges, all had alike the full Christian 
responsibilities. I have known a man of science, 


230 


LECTUKE VI. 


a Roman catholic, express the most intolerant 
opinions as to dissenters from the Romish com¬ 
munion, and yet when pressed on the subject, de¬ 
clare that his business was science, and that he knew 
nothing about theology. But the religious reform¬ 
ing party of the seventeenth century would allow 
their men of science no such shelter as this. They 
were members of Christ’s church, and must know 
and believe Christ’s truth for themselves, and not by 
proxy. With such a party then, considering that 
the truth for which they demanded such implicit 
faith, was their own interpretation of Scripture, 
formed on no very enlarged principles, the intellec¬ 
tual enquirer, who demanded a large liberty of 
thought, and to believe only what he could reason¬ 
ably accept as true, could entertain no sympathy. 

But with the party opposed to them it was dif¬ 
ferent. To a man not in earnest the principle of 
church authority is a very, endurable shackle. He 
does homage to it once for all, and is then free. In 
matters of church government, however, men in 
earnest no less than men not in earnest found that 
intellectually speaking the antipopular party dealt 
more gently with them than the puritans. For 
Hooker’s principle being adopted, that the church 
had great liberty in its choice of a government, as 
well as of its ceremonial, the existing church govern¬ 
ment and ritual rested its claim not on its beinsr 

© 

essential always, and divinely commanded, but on 
being established by lawful authority. On this prin¬ 
ciple any man might obey it, without being at all 


LECTURE VI. 


231 


obliged to maintain its inherent excellence: his con¬ 
formity did not touch his intellectual freedom. With 
respect to doctrines, even to the honest and earnest 
believer there was in many points also allowed a 
greater liberty. Where the church did not pro¬ 
nounce authoritatively, the interpretation of Scrip¬ 
ture was left free: and the obvious sense w T as not 
imposed upon men’s belief as the true one. Thus 
the peculiar points of Calvinism were rejected by 
the antipopular party, the more readily no doubt be¬ 
cause Calvin had taught them, but also by many be¬ 
cause of their own startling character. But where 
there was an indifference to religious truth alto¬ 
gether, there the principle of church authority, and 
the strong distinctions drawn between the know- 
ledge required of the clergy, and that necessary for 
the laity, offered a most convenient refuge. It cost 
such a man little not to attack opinions about which 
he cared nothing; it cost him little to say that he 
submitted dutifully to the authority of the church, 
being himself very ignorant of such matters, and un¬ 
able to argue about them. His ignorance was really 
unbelief; but his profession of submission allowed 
him to enquire freely on other matters which he 
did care for, and there to assert principles which, if 
consistently applied, might shake what the church 
most maintained. But he would not make the ap¬ 
plication, and like the Jesuit editors of Newton, he 
was ready if questioned to disclaim it. 

Thus up to the breaking out of the civil war in 
1642 , we find some of the most enquiring and purely 


232 


LECTURE VI. 


intellectual men of the age, such as Hales and Chil- 
lingworth, strongly attached to the antipopular party. 
And it was his extreme shrinking from what he con¬ 
sidered the narrow-mindedness of the puritans, which 
principally, I think, influenced the mind of Lord 
Falkland in joining at last the antipopular cause as 
the least evil of the two. But as the civil war went 
on, the popular party underwent a great change; a 
change which prepared the way for the totally new 
form in which it appeared in Europe in that second 
period of modern history which I have called the 
period of the political movement. 

Before, however, w T e trace this change, let us con¬ 
sider generally the progress of the struggle in the 
first forty years of the seventeenth century. What 
strikes us predominantly is, that what in Elizabeth’s 
time was a controversy between divines, was now a 
great political contest between the crown and the 
parliament. I have already observed that the grow¬ 
ing vigour of the nation necessarily gave a corre¬ 
sponding vigour to the parliament: its greater as¬ 
cendancy was in the course of things natural. And 
although the nation was growing throughout the 
forty years and more of Elizabeth’s reign, yet of 
course the period of its after growth produced much 
greater results: the infant grows into the boy in his 
first ten years of life; but it is in the second ten 
years, from ten to twenty, that he grows up into the 
freedom of manhood. But yet it cannot be denied 
that had Elizabeth reigned from 1603 to 1642, the 
complexion of events would have been greatly dif- 


LECTURE VI. 


233 


ferent. A great sovereign might have either headed 
the movement or diverted it. For instance, a so¬ 
vereign who observing the strength of the national 
feeling in favour of the protestant Reformation had 
entered frankly and vigorously into the great con¬ 
tinental struggle; had supported on principle that 
cause which Richelieu aided purely from worldly 
policy; had struck to the heart of Spain by a sus¬ 
tained naval war, and by letting loose Raleigh and 
other such companions or followers of Drake and 
Frobisher upon her American colonies; while he had 
combated the Austrian power front to front in Ger¬ 
many, and formed an army like Cromwell’s in foreign 
rather than in domestic warfare, such a king would 
have met with no opposition on the score of sub¬ 
sidies ; his faithful commons would have supported 
him as liberally and heartily as their fathers had 
supported Henry the Fifth’s quarrel with France, or 
as their posterity supported the triumphant adminis¬ 
tration of the first William Pitt. And puritan plans 
of church reform would have been cast aside un¬ 
heeded : the star-chamber would have remained un¬ 
assailed, because it would have found no victims, or 
none whom the public mind would have cared for; 
and Hampden instead of resisting the tax of ship- 
money, would, like the Roman senators of old, have 
rather built and manned a ship at his own single 
cost; and commanding it in person for the cause of 
God and the glory of England, might have died like 
Nelson after completing the destruction of the 
Spanish navy, instead of perishing almost in his own 


234 


LECTURE VI. 


native county, at that sad skirmish of Chalgrave 
field. 

This might have been, had James the First been 
the very reverse of what he was; and then the 
contest would have been delayed to a later period, 
and have taken place under other circumstances. 
For sooner or later it could not but come, and the 
first long peace under a w T eak monarch would have 
led to it. For the supposed long course of foreign 
wars would have caused parliaments to have been 
continually summoned, so that it would not have 
been possible afterwards to have discontinued them; 
and whenever the parliament and a weak king had 
found themselves in presence of each other, with no 
foreign war to engage them, the collision was in¬ 
evitable. We have rather therefore reason to be 
thankful that the struggle did take place actually, 
when no long war had brought distress upon the 
whole nation, and embittered men’s minds with what 
Thucydides a calls its rude and violent teaching; but 
in a time of peace and general prosperity, when our 
social state was so healthy that the extreme of poli¬ 
tical commotion did not seriously affect it; so that 
although a three or four years’ civil war cannot but 
be a great calamity, yet never was there any similar 
struggle marked with so little misery, and stained 
with so few crimes, as the great English civil war of 
the seventeenth century. 

Meantime, as I said, the character of the popular 
party underwent a change. For as the struggle be- 

a III. 82 . 


LECTURE VI. 


235 


came fiercer, and more predominantly political, and 
bold and active men were called forward from all 
ranks of society, it was impossible that the puritan 
form of church government, or their system of Scrip¬ 
ture interpretation, should be agreeable to all the 
popular party. Some broke off therefore in one 
direction, others in another. In times when the 
masses were no longer inert, but individual character 
was everywhere manifesting itself, no system of cen¬ 
tralization, whether in the hands of bishops or pres¬ 
byters, was likely to be acceptable. Centralization 
and active life pervading the whole body are hard to 
reconcile: he who should do this perfectly, would 
have established a perfect government. For “ quot 
homines tot sententise” holds good only where there 
is any thinking at all: otherwise there may be a 
hundred millions of men and only “ una sententia,’ 
if the minds of the 99,999,999 are wholly quiescent. 
And thus the independent principle arose naturally 
out of the high excitement on religious questions 
which prevailed throughout the nation; just as the 
multitude of little commonwealths in Greece, and in 
Italy in the middle ages, shewed the stirring of poli¬ 
tical life in those countries. Each congregation was 
independent of other congregations; each individual 
in the congregation, according to his gifts real or fan¬ 
cied, might pray, exhort, and interpret Scripture. 
Men so resolute in asserting the rights of the small 
society against the larger, and of the individual 
against the society, could not but recognise, I do not 
say, the duty, so much as the necessity ol toleration; 


236 


LECTURE VI. 


and thus the independents shewed more mutual in¬ 
dulgence in this matter than any religious party had 
as yet shewn in England. But such a system, to 
say nothing of its other defects, had in it no principle 
of duration; for it seems a law that life cannot long 
go on in a multitude of minute parts without union, 
nay even without something of that very centraliza¬ 
tion which yet if not well watched is so apt to de¬ 
stroy them by absorbing their life into its own: there 
wants a heart in the political as in the natural body, 
to supply the extremities continually with fresh 
blood. 

But I said that the popular party broke off from 
puritanism partly in one direction and partly in an¬ 
other. Some there were who set the religious part 
of the contest aside altogether; esteeming the dis¬ 
putes about church government of no account, hold¬ 
ing all the religious parties alike in equal contempt, 
as equally narrow-minded in their different ways. 
The good government of the commonwealth was 
their main object, with a pure system of divine phi¬ 
losophy. The eyes of such men were turned rather 
to Greece and Rome than to any nearer model; there 
alone, as they fancied, was to be found the freedom 
which they desired. Others, who were incapable of 
any romantic or philosophical aspirations, desired 
simply such objects as have been expressed in later 
times under the terms civil and religious liberty; 
they deprecated unjust restraint whether external or 
internal; but with this negation their zeal seemed 
to rest contented. A great and fatal error, and which 


LECTURE VI. 


237 


lias clone more than any thing else to make good 
men in later times stand aloof from the popular 
cause. For liberty, though an essential condition of 
all our excellence, is yet valuable because it is such 
a condition: I may say of it what I have said of ac¬ 
tual existence, that the question may always be asked 
why we are free, and if the answer is, that we may 
do nothing, or that we may please ourselves, then 
liberty so far as we are concerned is valueless: its 
good is this only, that it takes away from another 
the guilt of injustice. But to speak of religious 
liberty, when we mean the liberty to be irreligious; 
or of freedom of conscience, when our only conscience 
is our convenience; is no other than a mockery and a 
profanation. It is by following such principles that 
a popular party justly incurs that reproach of a/coXao-ia 
which the ancient philosophers bestowed especially on 
democracies. 

I have tried to analyze the popular party: I must 
now endeavour to do the same with the party op¬ 
posed to it. Of course an antipopular party varies 
exceedingly at different times; when it is in the 
ascendant its vilest elements are sure to be up¬ 
permost: fair and moderate men,—just men, wise 
men, noble-minded men,—then refuse to take part 
with it. But when it is humbled, and the opposite 
side begins to imitate its practices, then again many 
of the best and noblest spirits return to it, and share 
its defeat though they abhorred its victory. We 
must distinguish therefore very widely, between the 
antipopular party in 1040 before the Long l arlia- 


238 


LECTURE VI. 


ment met, and the same party a few years, or even 
a few months, afterwards. Now taking the best 
specimens of this party in its best state, we can 
scarcely admire them too highly. A man who leaves 
the popular cause when it is triumphant, and joins 
the party opposed to it, without really changing his 
principles and becoming a renegade, is one of the 
noblest characters in history. He may not have the 
clearest judgment, or the firmest wisdom; he may 
have been mistaken, but as far as he is concerned 
personally, we cannot but admire him. But such a 
man changes his party not to conquer but to die. 
He does not allow the caresses of his new friends to 
make him forget, that he is a sojourner with them 
and not a citizen : his old friends may have used him 
ill, they may be dealing unjustly and cruelly: still 
their faults, though they may have driven him into 
exile, cannot banish from his mind the consciousness 
that with them is his true home: that their cause is 
habitually just and habitually the weaker, although 
now bewildered and led astray by an unwonted gleam 
of success. He protests so strongly against their 
evil that he chooses to die by their hands rather 
than in their company; but die he must, for there is 
no place left on earth where his sympathies can 
breathe freely; he is obliged to leave the country of 
his affections, and life elsewhere is intolerable. This 
man is no renegade, no apostate, but the purest of 
martyrs: for what testimony to truth can be so pure 
as that which is given uncheered by any sympathy; 
given not against enemies amidst applauding friends; 


LECTURE VI. 


239 


but against friends, amidst unpitying or half-rejoicing 
enemies. And such a martyr was Falkland! 

Others who fall off from a popular party in its 
triumph are of a different character; ambitious men, 
who think that they are become necessary to their 
opponents, and who crave the glory of being able to 
undo their own work, as easily as they had done it: 
passionate men, who quarrelling with their old asso¬ 
ciates on some j^ersonal question join the adversary 
in search of revenge; vain men, who think their 
place unequal to their merits, and hope to gain a 
higher on the opposite side: timid men, who are 
frightened as it were at the noise of their own guns, 
and the stir of actual battle; who had liked to dally 
with popular principles in the parade service of de¬ 
bating or writing in quiet times, but who shrink 
alarmed when both sides are become thoroughly in 
earnest: and again, quiet and honest men, who never 
having fully comprehended the general principles at 
issue, and judging only by what they see before them, 
are shocked at the violence of their party, and think 
that the opposite party is now become innocent and 
just, because it is now suffering wrong rather than 
doing it. Lastly, men who rightly understand that 
good government is the result of popular and anti- 
popular principles blended together, rather than of 
the mere ascendancy of either; whose aim, there¬ 
fore, is to prevent either from going too far, and to 
throw their weight into the lighter scale: wise men 
and most useful, up to the moment when the two 
parties are engaged in actual civil war, and the ques- 


240 


LECTURE VI. 


tion is, which shall conquer. For no man can pre¬ 
tend to limit the success of a party, when the sword 
is the arbitrator: he who wins in that game does not 
win by halves: and therefore the only question then 
is, which party is on the whole the best, or rather 
perhaps the least evil; for as one must crush the 
other, it is at least desirable that the party so crushed 
should be the worse. 

Again, of the supporters of an antipopular party 
in its ordinary state, before it has received accessions 
from its opposite, there is also a considerable variety. 
Walton a , when describing the three parties of the 
reign of Elizabeth, speaks of them as “ the active 
Romanists,” “ the restless non-conformists,” and “ the 
passive and peaceable Protestants.” This virtue of 
quietness, meekness, and peaceableness, the airpay- 
fjuocrvvT] of the Athenians, has been ascribed to Walton 
himself, and is often claimed as the characteristic 
excellence of an antipopular party, and particularly 
of the antipopular party of our English contests of 
the seventeenth century. Now it may be, though I 
do not think that it is made out clearly, that there 
existed at Athens a state of things so feverish—that 
a town life, surrounded by such manifold excitements 
as was that of the Athenians, had so overpowered 
the taste for quiet—that the a7rpayp,wv, or the man 
who followed only his own domestic concerns, was a 
healthy rarity. But in general, and most certainly 
with our country life, and our English constitutions, 
partaking something of the coldness of our northern 

a Life of Hooker. 


LECTURE VI. 


241 


climate, it is extraordinary that any should have re¬ 
garded this aTrpayfjboavvT] as a rare virtue, and praised 
the meekness of those who being themselves well off, 
and having all their own desires contented, do not 
trouble themselves about the evils which they do not 
feel; and complain of the noisy restlessness of the 
beggars in the street, while they are sitting at their 
ease in their warm and comfortable rooms. Isaac 
Walton might enjoy his angling undisturbed in spite 
of star-chamber, ship-money, high-commission court, 
or popish ceremonies; what was the sacrifice to him 
of letting the public grievances take their own way, 
and enjoying the freshness of a May morning in the 
meadows on the banks of the Lea ? Shew me a 
population, painfully struggling for existence, toiling 
hard and scarcely able to obtain necessary food, and 
seeing others around them in the enjoyment of every 
luxury, and this population repelling all agitation, 
and going on peaceably and patiently under a system 
in which they and they alone are suffering; and I 
will yield to no man in my admiration, in my deep 
reverence, for such quietness, or rather for such true 
meekness, such self-denying resignation. For there 
is not a living man on whom hunger and cold do not 
press heavily, if lie has to bear them ; and he who 
endures these is truly patient. But are all men 
keenly alive to religious error? to political abuses 
which do not touch them? to injustice from which 
others only are the sufferers? Or are our English 
minds so enthusiastic, that our most dangerous ten¬ 
dency is to forget our own private and personal con- 


242 


LECTURE VI. 


cerns, to crave after abstract changes in church and 
state, and to rail against existing institutions with 
the certainty of meeting as our reward poverty and 
a gaol ? Generally, then, there is no merit in the 
acquiescence in existing things shewn by the mass of 
the population whose physical comforts are not 
touched, nor their personal feelings insulted. There 
may be individuals, no doubt, whose submission is 
virtuous: men who see clearly what is evil, and de¬ 
sire to have it redressed, but from a mistaken sense 
of duty, and from that only, forbear to complain of 
it. But where the evil is one which the mass care 
little for, when to complain of it is highly dangerous, 
and there is enough of work and enjoyment in their 
own private concerns to satisfy all the wants of their 
nature, I know not how the political peaceableness of 
such persons can be thought in itself to be either ad¬ 
mirable or amiable. It seems to me to be in itself 
neither admirable nor strongly blameable; but simply 
the following of a natural tendency ; and of this sort 
was the dislike of the popular party entertained by 
the great majority of their opponents. 

Others however there were who were opposed to 
the popular party, at least so long as it was pre¬ 
dominantly religious, on more positive and earnest 
grounds. A vast multitude of principles and prac¬ 
tices had been joined together in the Roman catholic 
system; not all necessarily connected with each 
other. Of these some desired to restore all, some 
loved peculiarly those which were most essential to 
the system really, though not in the eyes of the 


LECTURE VI. 


243 


vulgar: others regretted only those which, having 
no necessary connexion with it, were yet proscribed 
for its sake. To all of these, and to many more be¬ 
sides which the church of England had actuallv 
adopted, the puritans professed the most uncom¬ 
promising hostility. Not only therefore were all 
those opposed to them who thought that the Reform¬ 
ation had gone too far; but many of those also who 
thought that it had gone far enough, and could not 
bear to go any farther. Men of taste, men who loved 
antiquity, men of strong associations which they felt 
almost sacred, were scandalized at the homeliness, 
the utter renunciation of the past, the rude snapping 
asunder of some of the most venerable usages, which 
were prominent parts of the puritan system. But 
along with these were others whose dislike to puritan- 
ism went deeper: some who dreaded their system of 
Scripture interpretation, and the doctrines which 
they deduced from it; a large party who believed 
the government by bishops to be divinely com¬ 
manded, as firmly as the puritans believed the same 
of their presbyteries; but many also, and from the 
beginning of the seventeenth century onwards con¬ 
tinually becoming more active, and raised to higher 
dignities, who in their hearts hated the Reformation 
altogether, hated especially the foreign protestants, 
hated the doctrine of justification by faith, loved 
ceremonies and rites, idolized antiquity, preached up 
the priesthood; and in the words of Lord Falkland, 
“ laboured to bring in an English though not a Roman 

r 2 


LECTURE VI. 


popery;” “I mean,” lie goes on a , “not only the out¬ 
side and dress of it, but equally absolute; a blind 

a The Lord Faulkland’s speech, Feb. 9th, 1641. O.S.—( From 
Nalsons Collections ):— 

“ * * * The truth is, Mr. Speaker, that as some ill minis¬ 

ters in our state first took away our money from us, and afterwards 
endeavoured to make our money not worth the taking, by turning 
it into brass by a kind of anti-philosophers stone: so these men 
used us in the point of preaching : first, depressing it to their 
power, and next labouring to make it such, as the harm had not 
been much if it had been depressed, the most frequent subjects 
even in the most sacred auditories, being the jus divinum of 
bishops and tithes, the sacredness of the clergy, the sacrilege of 
impropriations, the demolishing of puritanism and propriety, the 
building of the prerogative at Paul’s, the introduction of such doc¬ 
trines as, admitting them true, the truth would not recompense the 
scandal; or of such as were so far false, that, as Sir Thomas More 
says of the casuists, their business was not to keep men from sin¬ 
ning, but to inform them, Quam prope ad peccatum sine peccato 
liceat accedere ; so it seemed their work was to try how much of a 
papist might be brought in without popery, and to destroy as 
much as they could of the Gospel, without bringing themselves # 
into danger of being destroyed by the law. * * Mr. Speaker, to 
go yet farther, some of them have so industriously laboured to de¬ 
duce themselves from Rome, that they have given great suspicion 
that in gratitude they desire to return thither, or at least to meet 
it half way; some have evidently laboured to bring in an English, 
though not a Roman popery : I mean not only the outside and 
dress of it, but equally absolute; a blind dependence of the people 
upon the clergy, and of the clergy upon themselves ; and have op¬ 
posed the papacy beyond the seas that they might settle one be¬ 
yond the water, [d. e. trans Thamesin, at Lambeth.]] Nay, com¬ 
mon fame is more than ordinarily false, if none of them have 
found a way to reconcile the opinions of Rome to the prefer¬ 
ments of England; and be so absolutely, directly and cordially 


LECTURE VI. 


245 


dependence of the people upon the clergy, and of 
the clergy upon themselves .” All these several ele¬ 
ments were found mixed up together in the anti- 
popular party of the first half of the seventeenth 
century. 

Let us now pass abruptly from 1642 to 1660; 
when the long contest was ended, the old constitu¬ 
tion restored, and the first period, which I have 
called the period of the religious movement, was 
brought to a close. Let us consider what the object 
of the movement had been, and what was its success. 
And first, as religious parties only, we have seen that 
there had been three, those who wished to maintain 
the system established at the Reformation, those who 
wished to alter it by carrying on the Reformation 
farther, and those who wished to undo it, and return 
to the system which it had superseded. We have seen 
that this last party could not act openly in its own 
name, and its own direct operations were therefore 
inconsiderable: but a portion of the established 
church party, in their extreme antipathy towards 
those who called for farther reform, did really labour 
in spirit to undo what had been effected already, serv¬ 
ing the principles of the Roman catholic party if not 
its forms. But the result of the contest was singu¬ 
larly favourable to the middle party, to the supporters 
of the Elizabethan reformation against the Roman 
catholics on one side, and against the puritans on the 
other. It was decided that the church of England 

papists, that it is all that £ 1,500 a-year can do to keep them from 
confessing it.” 


246 


LECTURE VI. 


was to remain at once protestant and episcopal, 
acknowledging the royal supremacy and retaining its 
hierarchy; repelling alike Romanism and puritanism; 
maintaining the reform already effected, resisting any 
reform or change beyond it. This is the first and 
obvious impression which we derive from the sight 
of the battle-field when the smoke is cleared away ; 
all other standards are beaten down, the standard of 
the protestant and episcopal church of England 
appears to float alone triumphant. 

But on examining more closely the state of the 
conquerors, we find that their victory has not been 
cheaply won; that they do not leave the field such 
as they came upon it. And this is the important 
part of the whole matter, that the original idea of 
the church of England, as only another name for the 
state and nation of England, was now greatly ob¬ 
scured, and from this time forward was ever more 
and more lost sight of. Change in the government 
of the church had been successfully resisted; there 
the puritans had done nothing; but changes of the 
greatest importance had been wrought in the state, 
not in its forms indeed, for the alteration of these 
had been triumphantly repealed by the Restoration, 
but in its spirit: the question whether England was 
to be a pure or mixed monarchy had been decisively 
settled; the ascendancy of parliament, which the 
Revolution of 1688 placed beyond dispute, was ren¬ 
dered sure by the events of the preceding contest; 
the bloodless triumph of King William was pur¬ 
chased in fact by the blood shed in the great civil 


LECTURE VI. 


247 


war. It was impossible then that that absoluteness 
of church government which had existed in the 
reigns of Elizabeth and her successors should be any 
longer tolerated ; no high-commission court could be 
appointed now, nor would the licence of the crown 
be held sufficient to give the clergy a legislative 
power, and to enable them to make canons for the 
church at their discretion. The canons of 1640, 
passed by Laud in the plenitude of his power, were 
annulled by the parliament after the Restoration no 
less than they had been by the Long Parliament; 
the writ De hseretico comburendo was now for the 
first time abolished by law. The old forms of church 
government had been maintained against all change, 
but being ill suited to the advance which had been 
made in the spirit of the general government, they 
were not allowed to possess their former activity. 

Whilst the identity of church and state was thus 
impaired on the one hand, it was also lessened in 
another way by the total defeat of the puritans, and 
by the ejection of such a multitude of their ministers 
by the new oaths imposed by the Act of Uniformity. 
Hitherto the puritans had been more or less a party 
within the church ; the dispute had been whether 
the church itself should be modelled after the puri¬ 
tan rule or no ; both parties as yet supposing that 
there was to be one church only as there was one 
nation. But first the growth of independency during 
the civil war, and now the vehement repulsion by the 
church of all puritan elements from its ministry, 
made it but too certain that one church would no 


248 


LECTURE VI. 


longer be coextensive with the nation. The old idea 
was attempted to be maintained for a while by force; 
we had the Five-Mile Act and the Conventicle Act, 
and such men as John Bunyan and William Penn 
were subjected to legal penalties; but to maintain 
an idea which was now contradicted by facts, became 
as impossible as it was unjust; and the Toleration 
Act, recognising the legal existence of various bodies 
of dissenters from the church, w r as at least a confes¬ 
sion that the great idea of the English' Reformation 
could not be realized in the actual state of things ; 
its accomplishment must be reserved for happier and 
better times. 

The church, or religious movement, having thus 
ended satisfactorily to the principles of neither party, 
the religious elements on both sides retired as it were 
into the background, and the political elements were 
left in the front rank of the battle alone. We cannot 
wonder, therefore, that the next great period of 
movement should have been predominantly political. 
The composition and vicissitudes of parties during 
this second period will form the subject of the next 
lecture. 


LECTURE VII. 


In attempting to analyze the parties of our history, 
I have purposely omitted, for the most part, the 
names of the individuals who headed them. By so 
doing we keep the subject clear at any rate of mere 
personalities, and avoid shocking that large portion 
of our political feelings which consists of personal 
likings or dislikings. But still how to describe even 
the abstract principles of two parties without indi¬ 
cating which on the whole we prefer, I confess I 
know not. For these principles are so closely con¬ 
nected with points of moral character, that I do not 
see how we can even wish to be indifferent to them. 
I have endeavoured to shew how in both parties they 
were mixed up together, partly good and partly evil, 
and if I have not done this faithfully in point of fact, 
then my statement is so far partial and unjust. But 
that certain principles in politics are in themselves 
good as the rule, and that others are bad as the 
rule, although not perhaps absolutely without excep¬ 
tion, I can no more wish to doubt, than I would 


250 


LECTURE VII. 


doubt in reading the contest between Christianity 
and heathenism, on which side lay the truth. 

Therefore in speaking of the Revolution of 1G88, 
I can imply no doubt whatever as to its merits. I 
grant that, descending to personal history, we should 
find principles sadly obscured; much evil must be 
acknowledged to exist in one party, much good or 
much that claims great allowance on the other. 
But to doubt as to the character of the Revolution 
itself, is to doubt as to the decision of two questions, 
which speaking to Englishmen, and to members of 
the church of England, I have no right, as I cer¬ 
tainly have no inclination, to look upon as doubtful. 
I have no right to regard it as doubtful, whether our 
present constitution be not better than a feudal 
monarchy; and whether the doctrine and discipline 
of our protestant church of England be not truer and 
better than those of the church of Rome. 

We will suppose then the Revolution accom¬ 
plished. King William and Queen Mary seated on 
the throne; the Bill of Rights and the Toleration 
Act passed; England and Scotland mostly at peace 
under the government of King William; the party 
of King James still predominant in Ireland. What 
were now the principal parties in the kingdom, and 
what were their objects? 

With one king on the throne in England and 
Scotland, and with another ruling in Ireland, and 
trying to recover the throne of Great Britain also, 
the main question at issue, and one to which all 
others were necessarily subordinate, was the main- 


LECTURE VII. 


251 


tenance or tlie overthrow of the Revolution. Judg¬ 
ing from the extraordinary fact that the Revolution 
had been effected almost, literally speaking, without 
bloodshed, we should have expected that the nation 
would have been almost unanimous in supporting it. 
But the debates in the convention which had pre¬ 
ceded the recognition of William had made it plain 
that this was not the case; and as every month 
which James passed in exile weakened the impres¬ 
sion of his faults and increased the pity for his mis¬ 
fortunes, so his cause after the Revolution gained 
strength rather than lost it. The party which had 
been foremost in placing William on the throne, 
united in itself all the remains of the ancient puri¬ 
tans, and of all those who had formed the popular 
party in Charles the Second’s time, together with 
many of those persons who are the great disgrace of 
this period of our history, persons who joined either 
party from motives of interest or ambition, when 
their opinions led them naturally the other way. 
The motto of all this party may be said to have been 
civil and religious liberty; their object was the 
maintenance of the power of parliament and through 
it of the liberty of the subject; the putting down 
popery, and the allowing liberty of worship to those 
dissenters who differed from the church on points of 
government or discipline. Beyond this, as is well 
known, the notion of religious liberty was not then 
carried : and it is remarkable, that at this very time 
an act of parliament was passed making the profes¬ 
sion of unitarianism in all its forms penal; so that 


252 


LECTURE VII. 


it was not popery only which remained exposed to 
the severities of the law. 

The party opposed to the one just described, con¬ 
tained within itself two remarkable divisions, which 
practically made such a difference as to constitute 
rather two distinct parties. For although both divi¬ 
sions looked upon the Revolution with dislike, yet 
one of them having a sincere love for the real pro- 
testant doctrine of the church of England, regarded 
the return of a Roman catholic king as a greater 
evil than the maintenance of the Revolution; and 
besides a large proportion of these, like the better 
part of the royalists in the civil war, were no friends 
to absolute monarchy, and wished the parliament to 
exist, and to be powerful. The other party, or division 
of the party, whichever we choose to call it, was 
anxious at any risk to restore James; the nominal 
protestants among them being in fact at the best 
such men as Lord Falkland had described in his 
days, as labouring to bring in an English though not 
a Roman popery, men whose whole sympathies were 
with the Romish system in doctrine and ritual, 
though they had not yet resolved to place the head 
of their church at Rome. Their political principles 
were as highly Ghibelin as their religious were Guelf: 
the divine right and indefeasible authority of kings 
stood in their belief side by side with the divine 
right and indefeasible authority of priests; and had 
these two powers again come into conflict, half of 
the Jacobites probably would have stood by the one, 
and half by the other. 


LECTURE VII. 


253 


Under these circumstances the maintenance of the 
Revolution was no doubt effected by this, that so far 
one division of the antipopular party went along 
with their opponents. But this was not only owing 
to the sincere and zealous protestantism of this divi¬ 
sion ; it was owing also to another point, which, 
whether we call it the wisdom or the happiness of 
the Revolution, is at any rate one of its greatest ex¬ 
cellencies and best lessons for all after ages. I mean 
that the Revolution preserved the monarchy, with 
all its style and dignity untouched : it made William 
king and not protector. The great seal was the 
same, the national colours remained the same, all 
writs ran in the same terms, all commissions were in 
the same form ; as far as all the common business of 
life was concerned, it was simply like the accession 
of a new king in natural succession, whose name was 
William instead of James. Now this is not a little 
matter. In France some years since the outward 
signs of revolution were visible everywhere: old 
names of streets were hastily painted over, and 
might still be traced through the new names which 
had been written upon them : on all government 
offices, and on many shops and other buildings the 
fresh colour of the word royale shewed that it had 
been but recently substituted for imperials , as that 
had a little before succeeded to nationals . By all 
this the continuity of a nation’s life is broken, and 
the deep truth conveyed in those beautiful lines of 
Mr. Wordsworth,-— 


254 


LECTURE VII. 


“ The child is father of the man, 

And I would wish my days to be, 

Bound each to each by natural piety,” 

a truth almost more important to be observed by 
nations than by individuals, is unhappily neglected. 
But it is the blessing of our English history that its 
days are thus bound each to each by natural piety: 
the child has been the father of the man. And thus 
the old loyalist, whose watchword was church and 
king, saw that after the Revolution no less than be¬ 
fore, the church and king were left to him : the 
church untouched in its liturgy, in its articles, in its 
government, in its secular dignity and in its wealth : 
the king sitting on the throne of his predecessors, 
unchanged in semblance, unchanged in the posses¬ 
sion of his legal prerogatives: still the sovereign of 
a kingdom, and not merely the first magistrate in 
the commonwealth. Nor can we doubt that this 
operated powerfully to reconcile men’s minds to the 
settlement of the Revolution, theirs especially who 
are influenced mainly by what strikes them out¬ 
wardly, and who found that the outward change was 
so little. 

The outward change was little, and yet what was 
gained by the Revolution and by the Act of Settle¬ 
ment which was passed a few years afterwards, was 
in importance incalculable. The reigning sovereign 
was bound to the cause of free and just government, 
by the consideration that his title to the crown 
rested on no other foundation ; that there was a com- 


LECTURE VII. 


255 


petitor in existence whose right on high monarchical 
principles was preferable to his own. Now, as the 
w hole temptation of kings must necessarily be to 
magnify their own authority, any thing which 
counteracts this tendency in them must be good 
alike for their people and for themselves. And this 
was the case, except during the reign of Queen 
Anne, from the Revolution to the middle of the 
eighteenth century; if the king forgot the princi¬ 
ples of the Revolution he condemned himself and 
denied his own title to the throne. Nor was it a 
little thing to have established once for all as the 
undoubted doctrine of the constitution, that the rule 
of hereditary succession, like all others, admits oc¬ 
casionally of exceptions; rare, indeed,—it is to be 
desired that they should be very rare,—one or two 
scattered up and down in the history of centuries,— 
but yet clear and undoubted, and to the full as legiti¬ 
mate when they do occur as the rule which they set 
aside. The exception made at the Revolution and 
confirmed by the Act of Settlement is in force to this 
very hour; for I need not say that if tire rule of 
hereditary succession be in all cases binding, the 
house of Brunswick is at this moment usurping the 
rights of the houses of Savoy or of Modena; for the 
princes of the house of Brunswick are descended 
only from a daughter of James the First, and except 
by virtue of the Act of Settlement they could not 
succeed to the throne whilst the heirs of a daughter 
of Charles the First were still living; and such heirs 
exist, I believe, in more than one royal house in 


256 


LECTURE VII. 


Italy; to maintain whose rights to the British crown 
would be, notwithstanding, treason. 

A few years after the Revolution, King James’s 
party was utterly put down in Ireland, and the three 
kingdoms were united under the authority of King 
William. The conquest of Ireland, for such it might 
almost be called, was followed by that famous penal 
code against the Roman catholics, which was de¬ 
signed to keep them for ever in a state of subjection 
and humiliation. It is curious to observe one of the 
most oppressive of all codes enacted by a popular 
party, whose watchword, as I have said, was civil 
and religious liberty. It is curious, yet ought not 
for a moment to puzzle any one who is familiar with 
ancient history. The democracy of Athens put to 
death a thousand Mytilenaeans of the oligarchical 
party, and confiscated the lands of the whole people. 
The injustice of the Athenian dominion over Lesbos 
may be questioned, or we may complain of the exces¬ 
sive severity of their treatment of the Mytilenacans; 
but not surely of its inconsistency with a sincere love 
of democratical principles of government. For the 
Mytilenaeans in the one case, like the Irish catholics 
in the other, had been the declared enemies of the 
popular cause; the one in Athens, the other in Eng¬ 
land : and their treatment was that of vanquished 
enemies and rebels, not of citizens. And as after 
the Mytilenaean revolt the people of Methymna were 
alone regarded by the Athenians as the free inhabit¬ 
ants of Lesbos; so the Irish protestants were re¬ 
garded by the English as the only Irish people: the 


LECTURE VII. 


257 


Roman catholics were looked upon altogether as an 
inferior caste. The whole question, in fact, relates 
to the treatment of enemies or subjects and not to 
that of citizens: and unjust wars or conquests or do¬ 
minions are not more inconsistent with a popular 
government than with any other: because the popu¬ 
lar principle is understood to be maintained only 
with regard to those within the commonwealth, and 
not to those who are without. They are not more in¬ 
consistent with one form of government than another, 
but I hope I shall not be supposed, therefore, to deny 
their guilt; that remains the same, and is not affected 
by the question of consistency or inconsistency. 

Greek history will enable us also to comprehend 
the feelings with which the popular and antipopular 
parties respectively regarded the great French war. 
The popular party felt towards France as the same 
party in Athens regarded Lacedaemon ; not merely 
as towards a national rival, but as towards a political 
enemy, who was leagued with their political enemies 
at home to effect the overthrow of their actual free 
constitution. And as Thucydides a says of the aristo- 
cratical party of the Four Hundred, that although they 
would have been glad to have preserved, if possible, 
the foreign dominion and the political independence 
of Athens, yet they were ready to sacrifice these to 
Sparta rather than fall under the power of their own 
democracy; so we can understand what otherwise 
would be incredible and monstrous, the desertion of 
the alliance, the putting Ormond into Marlborough’s 

* VIII. 91. 


s 


258 


LECTURE YIT. 


place, and the separate negotiations with France in 
1713. And, on the other hand, that the enmity of 
the popular party was directed not against France 
nationally, but against the supporter of their do¬ 
mestic enemies, was shewn by the friendly relations 
which subsisted between the two countries in the 
reign of George the First, when Philip of Orleans 
was at the head of the French government, and 
France was no longer in league with the partisans of 
James. The war which afterwards broke out in 
1740, appears to have arisen solely from national 
and European causes; aud the support which the 
French then afforded to the insurrection of 1745 
was merely given as an effectual means of annoying 
a foreign enemy, and diverting the attention of the 
English from the great military struggle in the 
Netherlands. Accordingly, we do not find that any 
party in England regarded France with favour in 
that war, or complained of the government except 
for a want of vigour and ability in their military and 
naval operations. 

The cause of the Revolution in France never at 
any time, I believe, was otherwise than popular with 
the poorer classes; the peasantry no less than the 
poor of the towns were, with a few local exceptions, 
such as La Vendee and Bretagne, its zealous sup¬ 
porters. In England it was otherwise ; the strength 
of the friends of the Revolution lay in the middle 
classes, in the commercial class, and in the high¬ 
est class of the aristocracy; the lower class of the 
aristocracy, the clergy, and the poorer classes, were 


LECTURE VII. 


259 


ranged together on the opposite side. The main 
cause of this difference is to be found in the fact 
that the French Revolution was social quite as 
as much as political: ours was political only. The 
abolition of the Seigneurial dominion in France, and 
the making all Frenchmen equal before the law, were 
benefits which the poorest man felt daily: but the 
English Revolution had only settled great consti¬ 
tutional questions, questions of the utmost import¬ 
ance indeed to good government, and affecting in the 
end the welfare of all classes of the community, but 
yet working indirectly, and in their first and obvious 
character little concerning the poor; while, on the 
other hand, the wars which followed the Revolution 
had led to an increased taxation. To this it must be 
added that the mere populace is at all times disposed 
to dislike the existing government, be it what it will: 
and as the popular party retained the government in 
its hands for many years, the habitual feeling against 
all governments happened to turn against them. In 
country parishes the peasantry went along with the 
country gentlemen and clergy from natural feelings 
of attachment; feelings which distress had not as yet 
shaken : while the town populace, and the country 
populace also, so far as they knew them, disliked the 
dissenters both socially and morally; socially, from 
the same feeling which at this moment makes it 
easier to excite the populace against the great manu¬ 
facturers than against the old nobility: jealousy, 
namely, against those nearer to themselves in rank, 
yet raised by circumstances above them ; and morally, 


260 


LECTURE VII. 


from a dislike of their strictness and religious pro¬ 
fession : the same feeling which urged the mob to 
persecute the first methodists, and which is curiously 
blended with the social feeling. For religious lan¬ 
guage, even when amounting to rebuke of ourselves, 
is borne more readily, to say the least, when it pro¬ 
ceeds from those who seem authorized to use it. 
Thus it gives less offence when coming from a clergy¬ 
man than from a layman: and to a poor man it comes 
more naturally from one whom he feels to be his 
superior in station, than from one more nearly his 
equal. Partly in connexion with this, is the greater 
toleration shewn by the Roman world to the Jews 
than to the Christians; the Jews seemed to have a 
right to believe in one God, because it was their 
national religion; but what right had one Roman 
citizen to pretend to be wiser than his neighbours, 
and to profess to worship one God, because that and 
that alone was the truth ? From such feelings, good 
and bad together, the populace in Queen Anne’s 
reign, and in that which followed, were generally 
averse to the dissenters and the popular party, and 
friendly to the clergy, and to the party opposed to 
the Revolution. 

Meanwhile years passed on, the house of Hanover 
was firmly seated on the throne ; on the death of 
George the First his son George the Second suc¬ 
ceeded him without the slightest opposition ; a larger 
portion of the clergy, and a very large majority of 
the nation had learnt not only to acquiesce in, but to 
approve heartily of the principles of the Revolution ; 


LECTURE VII. 


261 


the victory of civil and religious liberty, as it was 
called, was completely won. Now then considering, 
as I have said before, that we have a right to ask for 
the fruits of liberty, just as we may ask for the fruits 
of health ; (for while we are ill we give up our whole 
attention to the getting the better of our sickness; 
and health is then reasonably our great object; but 
when we are well, if instead of using our health to 
do our duty, we go on idly talking about its excel¬ 
lence, and think of nothing but its preservation, we 
become ridiculous valetudinarians); even so, having 
a right to demand of men, when their liberty is se¬ 
cured, what fruits they have produced with it, let us 
even put this question to the triumphant popular 
party of the eighteenth century. And if we hear no 
sufficient answer, but only a mere repetition of phrases 
about the excellence of civil and religious liberty, 
then we shall do well, not indeed to fall in love with 
the antipopular party, and say that sickness is better 
than health, but to confess with shame that the 
popular party has neither practised nor understood 
its duty; that they laboured well to clear the ground 
for their building, but when it was cleared they 
built nothing. 

Here seems to me to be the great fault of the last 
century: as in the eyes of many it is its great ex¬ 
cellence ; that it was for letting things alone. In 
some respects, indeed, it stopped its own professed 
work too soon ; for trade was not free, but burdened 
with a great variety of capricious restrictions: sine¬ 
cure places, and these granted in reversion, were 


262 


LECTURE VII. 


exceedingly numerous : the press, had the disposition 
of the government been jealous of it, was still greatly 
at its mercy; for as yet it remained with the judges 
only to decide whether a publication was or was not 
libellous: the business of the jury was merely to 
decide on the fact, whether the defendant had pub¬ 
lished it. But with regard to institutions of the 
greatest importance, the neglect was extreme. The 
whole subject of criminal law and prison discipline 
was either left alone, or touched only for mischief. 
The state of the prisons, both physically and morally, 
was as bad as it had been in the preceding century; 
the punishment of death was multiplied with a fear¬ 
ful indifference; education was everywhere wanted, 
and scarcely anywhere to be found. Persons are 
now living who remember the old state of things in 
this university, when a degree might be gained with¬ 
out any reading at all: and the introduction of Sunday 
schools is also within living memory. It is not to be 
wondered at that attention should not have been 
turned immediately to these and many other points; 
but still the principle of the age had no tendency to 
them : in political and ecclesiastical matters the work 
had been so long to get rid of what was bad, that it 
seemed to be forgotten that it was no less important 
to build up what was good: and men’s positive ef¬ 
forts seemed to run wholly in another direction, to¬ 
wards physical and external advancement. 

Then there arose in England, for I am now look¬ 
ing no farther, a new form of political party. It is 
well known that the administration of the first Wil- 


LECTURE VII. 


263 


liam Pitt was a period of unanimity unparalleled in our 
annals: popular and antipopular parties had gone to 
sleep together: the great minister wielded the 
energies of the whole united nation; France and 
Spain were trampled in the dust: protestant Ger¬ 
many saved; all North America was the dominion of 
the British crown ; the vast foundations were laid of 
our empire in India. Of almost instantaneous 
growth, the birth of two or three years of astonishing 
successes, the plant of our power spread its broad and 
flourishing leaves east and west, and half the globe 
rested beneath its shade. Yet the worm at its root 
was not wanting. Parties awoke again, one hardly 
knows how or why, and their struggle during the 
early part of the reign of George the Third was of 
such a character, that after studying it attentively, 
we turn from it as from a portion of history equally 
anomalous and disagreeable. Yet its uninstructive- 
ness in one sense is instructive in another; and I will 
venture to call your attention to that period in which 
the most prominent names—alas! for the degraded 
state of English party—are those of John Wilkes 
and of Junius. 

For the first time for nearly fifty years the king 
was supposed to be disinclined to the principles of 
the Revolution; the great popular minister, Pitt, 
had resigned, and the minister who was believed to 
be the king’s personal favourite, was believed also to 
be strongly attached to the principles of the old anti¬ 
popular party. These circumstances, together with 
some dissatisfaction at what were called the inade- 


264 


LECTURE VII. 


quate terms of the peace with France and Spain, 
revived party feelings in a portion of the community 
with much warmth. The press became violent, and 
Wilkes’s famous attack on the king’s speech in 
No. 45 of the North Briton, drew down a prosecution 
from the government. He happened at that time to 
be a member of the house of commons; and the 
house expelled him. I will not detain you with the 
detail of his case; it is enough to say that having 
been elected as member for Middlesex after his ex¬ 
pulsion, the house of commons would not allow him 
to sit: and when he again offered himself as a can¬ 
didate, and had obtained an enormous majority of 
votes over his competitor, the house of commons 
nevertheless resolved that his competitor was duly 
elected, and he took his seat for Middlesex accord- 
ingly. 

The striking point in this new state of parties 
cannot fail to have attracted your notice: namely, 
that the house of commons is no longer on the po¬ 
pular but on the antipopular side; and that the 
popular party speaks no longer by the voice of any 
legally constituted authority, but by that of indivi¬ 
duals, self-appointed to the service, and through the 
press. This was a great change, and, as I think, a 
change in some respects for the worse. But it is 
very important to dwell upon, because it is the result 
of a natural law, and therefore is constantly to be 
looked for, unless steps are taken to prevent it. We 
have noticed an instance of the same thing in our 
religious Reformation; no sooner had the leaders of 


LECTURE VIE 


265 


the English church made good their cause against 
Rome, than they became engaged in disputes with 
their own followers who wanted to carry on the Re¬ 
formation still farther. But what was a reformation 
yesterday is become an establishment to-day; and 
the reformer of yesterday is to-day the defender of 
an establishment, opposed in his turn to those who 
by wishing for farther reformation necessarily assail 
the reformation already effected. So when the house 
of commons had established the ascendancy of parlia¬ 
ment against the crown, and through that ascendancy 
had no doubt secured also the liberties of the nation, 
they naturally stopped and thought that their work 
was done. Besides, for the last fifty years the crown 
had headed the popular party, and the efforts which 
the popular leaders had made, through the influence 
of the crown, to secure a majority against the influ¬ 
ence of their opponents, had thus been all directed, 
whatever be thought of the means used, towards se¬ 
curing the triumph of popular principles, the princi¬ 
ples, that is, of the Revolution. Things were won¬ 
derfully changed, when the crown was supposed to 
have gone over to the opposite side, and when its 
influence was acting in concurrence with that very 
party which it had long been accustomed to combat. 
The popular party therefore no longer had the major¬ 
ity of the commons in its favour; but on the contrary 
received from the house of commons its immediate 
reproof. Now while the house clearly led the popular 
cause, its acts of authority excited no ill will; soldiers 
will bear any strictness of discipline from officers 


266 


LECTURE VII. 


whom they thoroughly trust, and who are in the habit 
of leading them on to victory. But let it be once 
whispered that these officers are traitors, or that they 
are even lukewarm and inefficient merely against the 
enemy, and any severity of discipline is then resented 
as tyranny. So it was with the popular party out of 
doors, when the house of commons, now as they 
thought inclined to the interest of their opponents, 
began to set up their power of expulsion as controll¬ 
ing the elective franchise of their constituents. The 
representatives were thus placed in opposition to 
their constituents, as the antipopular party opposed 
to the popular: but the constituents were no legally 
organized body; they were undistinguished, except 
by their right of voting, from the whole mass of the 
nation ; nor was there in existence any constitutional 
power lower than the house of commons, which in 
this new struggle might be against the house of 
commons itself what that house had formerly been 
against the crown. The corporation of London at¬ 
tempted to supply this want, but in vain : it could 
not pretend to be a national but merely a local body; 
and London has never exercised such an influence 
over the country, as that the chief magistrate of 
London should be recognised as the popular leader 
of England. The popular party then, as I have said 
before, having no official organ, spoke as it best could 
through self-appointed individuals, and through the 
press. 

This changed state of things is one with which we 
are very familiar: a strong popular party out of par- 


LECTURE VII. 


267 


liament, and that great power of the public press, 
which with much truth as well as humour has been 
called the fourth estate of the realm, are two of the 
most prominent features of these later times. Both 
undoubtedly have their evils, but both are the natural 
and unavoidable consequence of the changed position 
of the house of commons on one side, and of the 
growth of the mass of the nation in political activity 
on the other. For there being, as I have said, no 
lower constitutional body which could be the heart 
as it were of the popular party, now that the house 
of commons had ceased to be so, it was a matter of 
plain necessity that the opposition should be carried 
on from the ranks of the people itself, in aid of that 
portion of the house of commons which upheld the 
same principles, but was, within the walls of parlia¬ 
ment, a minority. And as for the press, reading in 
our climates so naturally takes the place of hearing, 
and is so indispensable where the state is not con¬ 
fined within the walls of a single city but is spread 
over a great country, that it could not but increase 
in power as the number of those who took an interest 
in public affairs became daily greater. True it is 
that its power, as actually exercised, was liable to 
enormous abuse. The writers in the public journals 
were anonymous, and although the printer and pub¬ 
lisher were legally responsible for the contents of 
their papers, yet the bad tendencies of anonymous 
writing are many more than the severest law of libel 
can repress. The best of us, I am afraid, would be 
in danger of writing more carelessly without our 


268 


LECTURE VII. 


names than with them. We should be tempted to 
weigh our statements less, putting forward as true 
what we believe indeed, but have no sufficient 
grounds for believing, to use sophistical arguments 
with less scruple, to say bitter and insulting things 
of our adversaries with far less forbearance. But 
then the writers for the public journals have the 
farther disadvantage of always writing hastily, and in 
many instances of writing for their bread, so that 
whatever other qualities their articles may have or 
not have, it is necessary that they should be such as 
will make the paper sell. Again, a journal is a 
property; like other property it may be bequeathed, 
bought, and sold, and may thus pass into hands totally 
indifferent to all political principles, and only anxious 
to make the property profitable. Instead of guiding 
public opinion, such a proprietor will think it better 
policy to follow it and encourage it; well knowing 
that to praise and agree with a man’s opinions is 
a surer way of pleasing him than to attempt to 
teach him better. Even where this is not the case, 
and a journal is honestly devoted to the maintenance 
of a certain set of political principles, yet the writers 
in it, over and above the disadvantages already 
noticed, of haste and of writing anonymously, are 
many times persons ill fitted by education or by 
station in society to form the wisest judgments on 
political questions; they have not knowledge suf¬ 
ficient to be teachers. All this is true; and journal¬ 
ism accordingly has pandered abundantly to men’s 
evil passions, has misled the public mind, many times, 


LECTURE VII. 


269 


instead of leading it aright. And farther, there is 
always a danger that popular principles, when advo¬ 
cated spontaneously by individuals, and not by a 
regular constitutional body, should become somewhat 
in excess, should respect actual institutions too little, 
and should savour too much of individual extrava¬ 
gance or passion. So that it would be an enormous 
evil if ever the popular party in the house of com¬ 
mons was so weak, that the main stress of the con¬ 
test should be carried on out of parliament, by 
speakers at public meetings or by the press. There 
is no question that something of this evil was felt in 
the latter part of the eighteenth century; too much 
devolved on the popular party out of doors and on 
the press, because of the vast superiority of the anti- 
popular party in parliament. But with all the evils 
of a political press, the question still recurs, What 
should we be without it ? Or how would it be pos¬ 
sible otherwise to satisfy the natural desire of an 
active-minded people, to know the state of their own 
affairs ? And there is no question that reading is a 
less exciting process than hearing; sophisms read 
quietly in our own house are less likely to mislead, 
than when commended by the eloquence of a popular 
speaker and the sympathy of a vast multitude, his 
hearers: what there is of mischief does less harm, 
while what there is of true information is better 
digested and better remembered. Again, whatever 
of sophistry and virulence there is in the public 
journals, yet this is partly neutralized as to its effects 
by their opposition to each other; and while we allow 


270 


LECTURE VII. 


for the existence of those faults, it is impossible to 
deny that the consequence of the system of extreme 
publicity is to communicate a great mass of real in¬ 
formation, that the truth after all is more widely 
known and with less scandalous corruptions than it 
could be under any other system conceivable. 

The evil of the public journals of the eighteenth 
century was that of the political writing of the time 
generally, and it arose out of that fault to which I 
have already alluded, when I said that the mere 
notion of civil and religious liberty was too exclu¬ 
sively worshipped by the popular party to the neglect 
of the moral end which lay beyond it. And this un- * 
happy separation of politics from morals, and from 
the perfection of morals, Christianity, was by no 
means peculiar to the popular party, nor to the 
eighteenth century; its causes lay deeper, and their con¬ 
sequences have been but too durable. In this respect, 
the existence of a church which was supposed to in¬ 
clude the whole nation within its pale, and to take 
effectual care of their highest interests, was in some 
respects absolutely mischievous when that church in 
practice was inefficient and disorganized. For as if 
the state were thus relieved from all moral responsi¬ 
bility, it took less care by its own regulations for the 
moral excellence of its magistrates than was taken 
by many a heathen commonwealth. The Roman 
censors expelled from the senate any man of scandal¬ 
ous life: and though their sentence was reversible, 
yet a judicium turpe, or being found guilty by a court 
of law of any one out of a great variety of specified 


LECTURE VII. 


271 


disgraceful offences, deprived a man of his political 
privileges irrevocably: lie lost even his vote as a 
member of the comitia. How different was the 
state of feeling in England, was but too clearly 
shewn in the dispute as to the re-election of Wilkes, 
after the house of commons had expelled him. 
Politically, the subsequent decision of the house of 
commons, which is now considered to have settled 
the question, seems perfectly just: the choice of a 
representative seems to belong to his constituents, 
within the bounds fixed by law; and the judgment 
of his fellow representatives against him is not so 
much to the purpose as the renewed decision of 
those who are more immediately concerned, given in 
his favour. Yet was the scandal extreme when a 
man of such moral character as Wilkes was made a 
popular leader, and when a great political principle 
seemed involved in choosing him to be a legislator. 
True it is that the opposite party had no right to 
complain of him, for the candidate whom they sup¬ 
ported against him was in moral character nothing 
his superior: it is a curious fact that both were 
members together in private life of that scandalous 
society whose meetings at Medmenliam Abbey be¬ 
tween Henley and Marlow were the subject at the 
time of many a disgraceful story. But it was and is 
one of the evils of our state, that personal infamy is 
no bar to the exercise of political rights: that a man 
may walk out of gaol and take his seat in the highest 
places, even as a legislator. And this same moral 
insensibility makes us tolerate the defects of the 


272 


LECTURE VII. 


press in these points, when we sympathize with it 
politically; because we are all accustomed too much 
to separate moral and political matters from each 
other; one party thinking of liberty only, and an¬ 
other of authority; but each forgetting what is the 
true fruit and object of both. 

As Wilkes was one of the worst specimens of a 
popular leader, so was Junius of a popular political 
writer. One is ashamed to think of the celebrity so 
long enjoyed by a publication so worthless. No 
great question of principle is discussed in it; it is re¬ 
markable that on the subject of the impressment of 
seamen, which is a real evil of the most serious kind, 
and allowed to be so even by those who do not believe 
that it is altogether remediable, Junius strongly de¬ 
fends the existing practice. All the favourite topics 
of his letters are purely personal or particular; his 
appeals are never to the best part of our nature, often 
to the vilest. If I wished to prejudice a good man 
against popular principles, I could not do better than 
to put into his hands the letters of Junius. 

But I have dwelt too long on this period of our 
history, and must hasten to conclude this sketch. 
The disputes about Wilkes’s election were soon lost 
in a far greater matter, the contest with America. 
In that contest the questions of our own former his¬ 
tory were virtually reproduced ; for it is quite mani¬ 
fest that the British parliament stood to the Ameri¬ 
can colonies in precisely the same relation in which 
the crown had formerly stood towards the people of 
England; every argument for or against ship-money 


LECTURE VII. 


273 


might have been pleaded for and against the Stamp 
Act. This Lord Chatham clearly perceived, and so 
far he was in agreement with the rest of the popular 
party. His opposition to the independence of the 
colonies belonged to the personal character of the man, 
to his invincible abhorrence of yielding to the house 
of Bourbon, to his natural unwillingness to divide that 
great American empire which his administration had 
founded. But he struggled against a law altogether 
distinct from the question about taxation, a law of 
nature herself, which makes distance an insuperable 
obstacle to political union; and when the time ar¬ 
rives at which a colony is too great to be dependent, 
distance making union impossible with a mother 
country at the end of the earth, the only alternative 
is complete separation. 

In the various contests which followed, to the end 
of the century, the character of the popular party re¬ 
mained pretty nearly the same : its object might still 
be said to be civil and religious liberty; the differ¬ 
ence was that these objects w T ere now often con¬ 
tended for for the sake of others, with whom English¬ 
men had no personal connexion. And so paramount 
are political principles, when they seem really at stake, 
to any national sympathies or antipathies, that at the 
end of the century the feelings of our two great poli¬ 
tical parties with regard to France were exactly re¬ 
versed from what they had been at the beginning of 
it, because France was become the representative 
of exactly opposite political principles. With perfect 
consistency therefore did the popular party deprecate 


T 


274 


LECTURE VII. 


and the antipopular party support the war with 
France in 1793, as in 1703 the antipopular party had 
opposed it, and the popular party had been zealous in 
its favour. 

It marks also the truth of the description which I 
gave of the later movement of Europe, calling it the 
political, as distinguished from the religious move¬ 
ment of the preceding period, that political con¬ 
sistency led parties to alter their feelings towards 
the same religious party; the popular party being 
zealous to undo that very penal code which their 
political ancestors had imposed on the Roman ca¬ 
tholics of Ireland, the antipopular party on the 
other hand vigorously maintaining it. Neither party 
were in the least inconsistent with their inherent 
political principles; and the religious feelings which 
in the case of the Roman catholics had a century 
earlier modified the political feeling, were now on 
both sides greatly weakened. 

The struggle then in this latter period of modern 
history, so far as England has been concerned, may 
be called a struggle for civil and religious liberty; 
understanding liberty in a perfectly neutral sense, 
and not as a deliverance from evil and unjust re¬ 
straint, but from restraint simply. And taking the 
word in this meaning, it seems to me that the state¬ 
ment cannot be disputed, that the object of one 
party during the eighteenth century was to unloose, 
the object of the other to hinder such unloosing; it 
being a distinct question whether the bands thus 
sought to be taken off or retained, were just or un- 


LECTURE VII. 


275 


just, useful or mischievous. And I think it is also 
certain that this object in the preceding’ period of 
modern history was combined with another of a more 
specific character, namely, the attainment of religious 
truth, which was on both sides a more positive object 
than the simply unloosing or holding fast, and one 
more certainly to be called good. 

What has been exemplified from our own history, 
holds true I think no less with respect to Europe at 
large. Unquestionably whatever internal movement 
there has been on the continent since 1648, has been 
predominantly political; undoubtedly also the object 
of that movement has been generally to unloose, to 
remove certain restraints external or internal; and 
the object of those opposed to that movement has 
been to maintain these restraints or to add to them. 

It would appear that this view of the question will 
enable us easily enough to account for the disap¬ 
pointment with which, whatever be our political 
opinions, we must rise from the study of this period of 
political movement. Disappointment, because evils 
great and unquestioned still exist abundantly, evils 
which both parties have failed to prevent. Those 
who advocate the side of the movement, when 
taunted with the little good which has resulted from 
their political successes, besides being at issue with 
their opponents as to the amount of good produced, 
might fairly acknowledge that the movement was 
essentially defective, that its object ought not to 
have been merely negative, that although to do away 
evil and unjust restraints is good, yet that our views 

T 2 


276 


LECTURE VII. 


should be carried much farther; we are unjust to our 
own work if we take no care that liberty shall be to 
all men’s eyes the mother of virtue. And on the 
other hand they who sympathize with the party 
which strove to hold fast the restraints, if they say 
that the mischief has resulted wholly from their own 
defeat, are yet required to account for the very fact 
of that defeat; and they too may acknowledge that 
to restrain a child or to confine a lunatic is not all 
that their cases need: that restraint is but a means 
no less than liberty; and that when man exercises it 
upon man, he is bound to shew that it is a means to 
work the good of the person restrained, or else it is 
an injustice and a sin. Now it is past all doubt that 
the antipopular party, both religious and political, 
have here greatly failed ; considering the people as 
children, they have restrained the child but they 
have not educated him; considering them even as 
lunatics, they have confined the lunatic, but have 
often so irritated him with their discipline as to make 
his paroxysms more violent and more incurable. 

Farther also, as to the judgment we should form 
of the struggle of the last three centuries, it is mani¬ 
fest that it depends in some measure on our judg¬ 
ment of the centuries preceding them. If all was 
well in those preceding centuries, the movement, 
whether religious or political, must have been unde¬ 
sirable ; for certainly all is not well now. If all was 
ill in those preceding centuries, then certainly the 
movement has been a great blessing; for our present 
state is blessed with very much of good. But it was 


LECTURE VII. 


277 


neither all well nor all ill; so much the most super¬ 
ficial knowledge may teach us: the question to de¬ 
cide our judgment is, whether it was ill or well pre¬ 
dominantly. 

In most other places it would he considered ex¬ 
traordinary to represent such a question as doubtful 
for a moment. But here there is always a tendency 
to magnify the past: five-and-twenty years ago I can 
remember that it was the fashion to exalt the seven¬ 
teenth century at the expense of the eighteenth: 
now I believe many are disposed to depreciate both, 
and to reserve their admiration for times still more 
remote, and more unlike our own. It is very well 
that we should not swim with the stream of public 
opinion: places like this are exceedingly valuable as 
temples where an older truth is still worshipped, 
which else might have been forgotten: and some 
caricature of our proper business must at times be 
tolerated, for such is the tendency of humanity. But 
still if we make it our glory to run exactly counter 
to the general opinions of our age, making distance 
from them the measure of truth, we shall at once 
destroy our usefulness and our real respectability. 
And to believe seriously that the movement of the 
three last centuries has been a degeneracy; that the 
middle ages were wiser, or better, or happier than 
our own, seeing truth more clearly and serving God 
more faithfully; would be an error so extravagant 
that no amount of prejudice could excuse us for en¬ 
tertaining it. 

It has been my object in this and in my last lec- 


278 


LECTURE VII. 


ture to exemplify from that history which is most 
familiar to us all, the method of historical analysis; 
by which we endeavour to discover the key as it 
were to the complicated movement of the world, and 
to understand the real principles of opposite parties 
amidst much in their opinions and conduct that is 
purely accidental. I believe that the result of the 
analysis now made, is historically correct; if it be 
otherwise, I have managed the experiment ill, and it 
has failed in this particular instance; but the me¬ 
thod itself is no less the true one, and you have only 
to conduct it more carefully in order to make it 
completely answer. In a brief review of a period of 
three centuries, I have made so many omissions that 
my sketch may seem to be superficial; and I grant 
that this is always the danger to be apprehended in 
our generalizations, and one which when speaking 
of a period so busy it is not easy to avoid. To be 
acquainted with ev^ry existing source of information 
illustrative of the last three centuries is of course 
physically impossible, while human life is no longer 
than it is: the only question is, or else all our read¬ 
ing must be useless, whether by a tolerably large 
and comprehensive study of a variety of sources we 
may not gain a notion substantially correct, which a 
still more extensive study, if such were practicable, 

would confirm and enrich, but would not materially 
alter. 

What I have now attempted to do briefly for a 
long and very busy period, I shall endeavour to do 
next year, if God shall permit, at greater length for 


LECTURE VII. 


279 


a shorter period, namely, for the fourteenth century. 
Whoever has already made that period his study or 
shall do so in the course of this year, may find it not 
uninteresting to compare the result of his enquiries 
with mine, and if he shall learn any thing from 
me he may he sure also that he might impart 
something to me in return, of which I was ignorant. 
For in this wide field there is full work for many 
labourers, and it is my hope that many of us may 
thus co-operate, and by our separate researches col¬ 
lect what no one man could have collected alone. 
In the mean while, my next and last lecture will be 
devoted to one or two more general matters; such 
particularly as the criteria of historic credibility, a 
question naturally of great importance, because unless 
we can discriminate between a credible testimony 
and a suspicious one, we shall never be able to avoid 
the evil either of unreasonable scepticism or of un¬ 
reasonable credulity. And the result of such an en¬ 
quiry will be what we could most wish; that there 
is an historical truth attainable by those who truly 
desire it, however easily and indeed inevitably missed 
by the unfair or even the careless historian, whatever 
may be his external advantages. This question, with 
one or two points connected with it, will be almost 
more than sufficient to occupy the time which we 
shall be able to afford to them. 

















. 


. 




% 























































LECTURE VIII. 


We have now for some time been engaged in ana¬ 
lyzing the statements of history, in order to the more 
clear understanding of them; and particularly we 
have been considering the forms of political party in 
our own country with a view to discover what in 
them has been accidental and what essential. I 
have assumed certain facts as unquestionably true 
and have made them the groundwork of what I have 
said, either to account for them, or to point out their 
consequences. But what are we to say, if these 
facts themselves are disputed: if we are taunted 
with the known exaggerations and falsehoods of 
human testimony: with the difficulties surrounding 
all investigation of human actions, even if most ably 
and fairly conducted; and with the many defects of 
individual writers which have made them, as in¬ 
vestigators, neither able nor fair ? Or are these ob¬ 
jections to be met by saying that although the truth 
relating to past ages be difficult to discover, yet that 
contemporary history is at any rate entitled to con- 


282 


LECTURE VIII. 


fidence: that men cannot misrepresent in the face 
of detection: that in this case truth may be dis¬ 
covered and cannot but be declared? Or is any 
other answer to be given, maintaining any other 
criterion; or shall we be obliged to confess the un¬ 
soundness of all our goodly fabric; and to compare 
historical deductions, however logical, to the ele¬ 
phant in the well-known apologue, which rested 
upon a tortoise, and the tortoise rested upon a stone, 
and the stone rested upon nothing ? 

The question now before us is clearly of con¬ 
siderable importance. If historical testimony be 
really worth nothing, it touches us in one of the very 
divinest parts of our nature, the power of connecting 
ourselves with the past. For this we do and can 
do only through knowledge which we must call his¬ 
torical. Without such knowledge, what would the 
ancient buildings of this place be but monuments 
more unmeaning than the Pictish towers of Scotland 
and Ireland ? They would not tell their own story 
alone, they would only shew that they were not new, 
and by examining their stone we might tell out of 
what quarries it had been hewn: but as to all that 
constitutes their real charm, as representing to us 
first the times of their founders, and then with 
wonderful rapidity the successive ages which have 
since passed, amidst how different a world their in¬ 
mates have generation after generation trod their 
courts, and studied in their chambers, and wor¬ 
shipped in their chapels, all this would be utterly 
lost to us. Our life would be at once restricted to 


LECTURE VIII. 


283 


the span of our own memory; nay, I might almost 
say to the span of our own actual consciousness, 
hor if no other man’s report of the past is to he 
credited, I know not how we can defend the very 
reports of our own memories. They, too, unques¬ 
tionably are fallible: they, too, very often are per¬ 
plexed by vague or conflicting recollections ; we can¬ 
not tell whether we remember or no; nor whether 
we remember correctly. And if this extreme scepti¬ 
cism be, as it clearly is, absurd even to insanity, yet 
we want to know what abatements are to be made 
from it; where it not only ceases to be insane, but 
becomes reasonable and true; there being no ques¬ 
tion at all that we have been often deceived with 
false accounts of the past: that human testimony is 
the testimony of those who are often deceived, who 
often endeavour to deceive, and who perhaps more 
often still are both in the one predicament and the 
other; not loving truth sincerely, and at the same 
time really unable to discern it. 

Now in an enquiry into the credibility of history 
in the largest sense of the word, the first question 
which we will consider is, whether any composition 
bearing more or less of an historical form be really 
historical or no in the intention of its author. For 
if it be not, then if we accept it ignorantly as such, 
we are in the condition of those persons on whom a 
trick has been played: our belief has in it something 
ludicrous, like theirs who innocently fall into a mis¬ 
chievous boy’s snare on the first of April; and 
although in this case there was probably no mischief 


284 


LECTURE VIII. 


intended, yet that makes our mistake only the more 
ridiculous, if we went wrong when no one endea¬ 
voured to mislead us. Conceive one of the his¬ 
torical novels of Sir Walter Scott surviving alone 
amongst its companions to some very remote age, 
when the greatest part of our literature should have 
perished, and all knowledge of Scott as a novelist 
should be utterly lost. Suppose that of all his 
numerous works there should exist only his Life of 
Napoleon, Paul’s Letters to his Kinsfolk, and his 
novel of Woodstock. Conceive posterity taking all 
the three works as equally historical; in the one, it 
might be said, we have an elaborate narrative in a 
regular historical form of the life of the Emperor 
Napoleon: in the second we have a most lively ac¬ 
count of the principal events of his second reign, 
given in letters written at the time and from the 
very scene of action : while in the third we have a 
narrative, taken probably from some ancient chronicle, 
and therefore much more dramatic and more full of 
minute details, of some passages in the life of Charles 
the Second, including the story of his wonderful con¬ 
cealment and escape after the battle of Worcester. 
It would then be received as fact, that Charles after 
his escape from the battle was sheltered and con¬ 
cealed at Woodstock, and that Cromwell himself 
came down to Woodstock, and, guided by the in¬ 
formation of a pretended royalist, had nearly suc¬ 
ceeded in surprising him. There is nothing in the 
book, it would be urged, that declares it to be a 
fiction; it is a narrative about real historical persons; 


LECTURE VIII. 


285 


why should we doubt its accuracy ? So men might 
argue, and might be led into a mistake which to us 
appears altogether ridiculous, because we know that 
Woodstock is a novel; but which is not at all in¬ 
conceivable in those who centuries afterwards should 
find it in company with other works of the same 
author which they supposed equally to be historical, 
and one of which in fact is so. Now there are times 
and writings in which all narrative bears more or less 
the character of an historical novel; it may contain 
truth and often does so: but this is merely accidental; 
the writer’s object is merely to amuse, and whether 


his story happens to be authentic or not gives him no 
sort of concern. Sometimes there seems to be ab¬ 
solutely an intention to mislead the simple reader; 
not a malicious or fraudulent intention, for any grave 
ends of falsehood, but, as appears, only for the mere 


joke’s sake : for the pleasure of imposing on the 
unsuspicious. Now wherever this spirit may at all 
be supposed to exist, we are completely falling into 
the writer’s trap if we really take him at his word, 
as if he were in earnest; and our error is not less, if, 
not understanding the character of narration whether 
in verse or prose, at the particular period, or in 
writers of a certain sort, we conceive exactness of 
fact to be its object, instead of amusement, or 
possibly some moral or religious lesson which the 
story was framed to inculcate. And therefore our 
first question with respect to a story or narrative 
should be, was the writer in earnest or in jest, ? an< 
if in earnest, was he in earnest as to the facts or 


286 


LECTURE VIII. 


as to the moral conveyed by the facts ? For he may 
have been very earnest indeed as a poet, or as a 
moral teacher, or as inculcating some deep religious 
truth under a symbolical veil, and yet not at all in 
earnest as a matter-of-fact historian. This question is 
one of great importance to put, and unhappily it is 
not always easy to find the answer to it. 

You will see where the difficulty lies if you con¬ 
sider the case which I supposed of some future age 
mistaking Woodstock for an authentic history. We 
do not mistake it, chiefly I think for certain external 
reasons; that it is published as a novel, and has 
always been received as such; and farther because 
we are familiar with many other works of the same 
sort, so that the notion of an historical novel is one 
which readily occurs to us. But ancient books do 
not tell us the story of their publication : we do not 
know how they were received by their original 
readers, nor are specimens of the literature of the 
time sufficiently numerous to enable us to conceive 
readily what form they would be likely to assume. It 
does not seem possible therefore always to have a 
sure criterion whether a given narrative be historical 
or no; or at any rate to have such a criterion as may 
be applied by ordinary readers ; such as is palpable 
and tangible, or to use the German expression, hand- 
greiflicli. A criterion there is indeed, not of course 
unerring, yet generally to be relied upon, in the in¬ 
stinctive tact of those who are much conversant with 
the narratives of early times, and with the character 
of undoubted history, and who feel at once where 


LECTURE VIII. 


287 


they have history, and where they have poetry, or 
apologue, or allegory, or a story careless of fact and 
aiming only at truth, or it may be seeking neither 
fact nor truth, but simply to amuse and astonish its 
readers. This feeling in a sensible man is, I believe, 
very much to be relied upon: but you cannot justify 
it to those who dispute it: you cannot establish it 
upon tangible evidence, appreciable by the ignorant 
no less than by the wise. 

b or the greater part of modern history, however, 
the question which we have now been considering 
will not give us any trouble. Yet it presents itself, 
I think, in some of the ecclesiastical biographies, 
where we find not unfrequently grotesque touches, 
to say nothing of other matters, such as leave great 
room for doubting whether their authors ever 
meant them to be taken as simple matter-of-fact 
narratives. The human mind so shrinks from undis¬ 
guised and unpalliated falsehood, that it is generally 
safer as well as more charitable, when we are read¬ 
ing a narrative which it is impossible to believe, to 
suppose that the writer himself did not mean it to 
be taken seriously; regarding the facts at best as the 
ornament, or, if you will, as a sort of conventional 
expression of wliat he did believe to be a truth, 
namely, the sanctity of the subject of his biography. 
We may call this, if we will, a species of pious 
fraud: but at any rate its guilt is much less than it 
would be now, inasmuch as it would not be equally 
regarded as a bringing forward false evidence to esta¬ 
blish a conclusion. The moment that facts come to 


288 


LECTURE VIII. 


be regarded in the light of essential evidence, with¬ 
out which our conclusion falls, then all tampering 
with or exaggerating them is a gross fraud, to be 
condemned with no qualification whatever. But I 
should doubt whether the spirit of the well-known 
story of the man who when told that the facts were 
wholly at variance with his theory replied, Tant pis 
pour les faits, was not very generally prevalent before 
the time of Bacon in more matters than in natural 
philosophy. Principles of science were assumed on 
a priori reasoning; and opinions in theology were 
held in the same manner, not indeed upon reasoning 
of any kind so much as upon authority, but yet inde¬ 
pendently of any supposed proof to be looked for 
from particular miracles. This consideration is per¬ 
haps worth attending to, as it may in some measure 
account for a carelessness as to the truth of facts 
which otherwise would be merely scandalous; and 
allows us to qualify as fictions what we otherwise 
should be obliged to call falsehoods. 

Passing on then to narratives which propose to be 
historical, that is, where stress is understood to be 
laid upon the facts, and it is the writer’s avowed ob¬ 
ject to represent these faithfully, and we ask under 
what circumstances and to what degree can we 
maintain their credibility. And first let us consider 
what are the claims of a writer upon our belief, 
merely on the strength of his being contemporary 
with the events which he relates. 

That a contemporary writer cannot avoid giving 
us some correct and valuable impressions of his times, 


LECTURE VIII. 


289 


is evident. For such points of detail as an antiqua¬ 
rian delights in he may be fully relied upon; and he 
himself is at any rate an authentic portrait; his own 
mind with its peculiar leanings, his own language 
with its peculiar style and forms of words, these 
must certainly be drawn faithfully because drawn 
unconsciously; and we cannot doubt their witness. 
But beyond this, and for historical facts properly so 
called, the value of a contemporary historian is 
often greatly overrated. No man sees the whole 
of his own times, any more than an officer in ac¬ 
tion sees the whole of the battle. Some are too 
busy to contemplate society in all its relations; 
others are too abstracted from it altogether. With 
regard to public events, ordinary men are but in a 
very slight degree witnesses of them: the councils of 
governments, the secret springs of parties, are known 
only to a few ; military and naval events take place 
publicly indeed, but often at a great distance, and 
though they may happen in our time, yet our know¬ 
ledge of them only comes from the reports of others. 
Again, it should be remembered, that many things 
which we have seen and heard we forget afterwards: 
that although we were contemporary with the events 
which took place ten years ago, yet that we are not 
perhaps contemporary with them when we relate 
them ; even what we ourselves said and did is no 
longer present to us; our witness is that of one liv¬ 
ing after the event. To this must be added disad¬ 
vantages which are generally recognised : the livelier 
state of passion to which a contemporary is liable, 

U 


290 


LECTURE VIII. 


the veil hanging over many characters and over the 
causes of many actions, which only after-ages will 
see removed. So that on the whole, it is by no 
means sufficient to know that a history was written 
by a contemporary: it may have been so, and yet 
may be of very little value; full of idle reports and 
unexamined stories, giving the first obvious view of 
things, which a little more observation would have 
shewn to be far from the true one. 

Ascending a step higher, and supposing an his¬ 
torian to be not merely contemporary with the 
events which he relates, but an actual witness of 
them, his credibility no doubt becomes much greater. 
We must distinguish, however, between what I may 
call an active and a passive witness. I call a passive 
witness one who was present, but took no part in 
the actions described; as for instance, Edward the 
Fourth’s chaplain, who has left us an account of 
King Edward’s landing in England after Warwick 
had obliged him to fly, of his march towards London, 
and of the decisive battle of Barnet. This is a wit¬ 
ness in the lowest degree, from which we ascend, 
according as the direct interest and share in the 
transactions related is greater, up to the highest sort 
of witness; namely, the main agent and director of 
the actions. Here we have knowledge as nearly 
perfect as possible; a full understanding of the 
action in all its bearings, a view of its different parts 
in connexion with each other; and a clear percep¬ 
tion and recollection of each, because our know¬ 
ledge of one helps us to remember another, and 


LECTURE VIII, 


291 


because we ourselves directed them. And thus in 
the case of Caesar and the Emperor Napoleon we 
have witnesses, to whose knowledge of the actions 
which they relate nothing, as it seems, could be 
added. Yet we should not be justified in viewing 
the Commentaries of the one or the Memoirs of the 
other as perfectly trustworthy histories; on the con¬ 
trary, few narratives require to be read with more 
constant and vigilant suspicion. For unhappily a 
knowledge of the truth does not imply an intention 
of uttering it; it may be, on the contrary, that he 
who knows perfectly the real state of the case should 
find it to his interest to represent it altogether differ¬ 
ently, and his knowledge then does but enable him 
to misrepresent more artfully. And as in the in¬ 
firmity of human nature no man’s actions are always 
what he likes to look back upon, as there are points 
in which he would wish that he had acted otherwise; 
so every man who tells his own story is under a 
temptation more or less to disguise the truth: and 
the more, in proportion as his actions have been upon 
a larger scale, and his faults or mistakes therefore 
have been more flagrant. Yet do we not lose en¬ 
tirely the benefit of a writer’s knowledge, even when 
his honesty is most questionable. He who always 
can tell the truth when he has a mind to do so, will 
tell it very often, because in a great many instances 
he has no conceivable interest in departing from it. 
Thus Caesar’s descriptions of countries have always 
been held to be of high value; for in them we have 
all the benefit of his intelligence, with nothing to be 


292 


LECTURE VIII. 


deducted on account of his want of principle. And 
so again in relating his own military conduct, as it 
was mostly so admirable that to relate it most truly 
was to praise it most eloquently, his knowledge gives 
us every thing that we can desire. The same may 
be said of Napoleon: his sketch of the geography of 
Syria, and of that of Italy, his account of Egypt, and 
his detail of his proceedings at the siege of Toulon, 
are all most excellent. The latter in particular, his 
account of the siege of Toulon, is a complete speci¬ 
men of what is valuable and what is suspicious in his 
narratives. His description of the topography of 
Toulon, and of his own views in recommending the 
attack on fort Malbosquet, as the point where the 
enemy’s operations might be impeded most effectu¬ 
ally, is all clear and admirable; but his statement of 
the enemy’s force in fort Malbosquet, and of the as¬ 
sault itself, is to be regarded with suspicion ; because 
his object not being truth but his own glory, he 
never puts himself for an instant in the place of an 
impartial spectator, to consider what were the disad¬ 
vantages of his enemy, but rather is inclined to ex¬ 
aggerate and multiply all his advantages, in order to 
represent the victory over him as more honourable. 

Thus neither is perfect knowledge a guarantee for 
entire trustworthiness. Still let us consider for how 
much it is a guarantee, namely, for truth in all indif¬ 
ferent matters, indifferent I mean to the writer or to 
his party; and for much truth easily to be discerned 
from its colourings, in matters that concern him 
nearly. And so again, a writer’s nearness to the 


LECTURE VIII. 


293 


times of which he treats is a warrant, not for his 
complete trustworthiness, but yet for accurate paint¬ 
ing of the outsides of things, at any rate; he cannot 
help telling us much that we can depend on, what¬ 
ever be his own personal qualifications. So in all 
historians, the mere outline of events is generally 
credible, and speaking of modern history, we can 
always also, or almost always, trust to the dates. 
We get everywhere therefore a certain portion of 
truth, only more or less corrupted; but what we 
want to know is, whether there be any qualification 
in an historian which will give us more than this; 
which will enable us to trust to him all but im¬ 
plicitly ; without any one positive deduction from his 
credibility, but merely with an acknowledgment that 
being human he is therefore fallible, and that if suffi¬ 
cient reasons exist for doubting his authority in any 
one point, we should not insist at all hazards on 
maintaining it. 

Now this one great qualification in an historian is 
an earnest craving after truth, and utter impatience 
not of falsehood merely but of error. This is a very 
different thing, be it observed, from a mere absence 
of dishonesty or partiality. Many minds like the 
truth a great deal better than falsehood when the 
two are set before them ; they will tell a story fairly 
with great pleasure, if it be told fairly to them. But 
not being impatient and intolerant of error, they suf¬ 
fer it to exist undiscovered when no one points it 
out to them: not having a deep craving after truth 
they rest easily satisfied with truth’s counterfeit. 


294 


LECTURE VIII. 


This is the dra\ai r rro)pla irp'os rrjv %V' T V (TLV T V 9 oXrjOelas 
of which Thucydides complains so truly, and which, 
far more than active dishonesty, is the source of most 
of the error that prevails in the world. And this 
fault in some degree is apt to beset us all; for it is 
with truth as with goodness, none of us love it so 
heartily as to be at all times ready to take any pains 
to arrive at it, as to question its counterfeit when it 
wears an aspect of plausibility. For example, there 
is a story which has become famous all over Europe, 
repeated from one historian to another, and from one 
country to another, which is yet totally untrue. I 
mean the famous story of the crew of the French 
ship Le Vengeur in the action of the first of June 
1794 refusing to strike their colours, and fighting 
their ship till she went down, and at the very moment 
that she was sinking shouting with one voice, Vive la 
Republique! Even Mr. Carlyle repeated this story 
in his history of the French Revolution, and I have 
seen it within the last month in a very able German a 
work published only last year, given as a remarkable 
instance of the heroism of the French sailors no less 
than of their soldiers during the war of the Revolu¬ 
tion. Not for one moment would I deny the con¬ 
clusion ; the heroic defence of the Guillaume Tell 
against a British squadron off Malta in 1800, and of 
the Redoubtable in the battle of Trafalgar, throw a 
glory on the courage of French seamen, which needs 
not to be heightened by apocryphal instances of their 

a Der zweite Pimische Krieg und der Kriegsplan der Carthager. 
Von Ludwig, Freiherrn von Vincke. Berlin, 1841 . 


LECTURE VIII. 


295 


self-devotion. But when Mr. Carlyle’s book appeared, 
one of the surviving British officers who were in the 
action of the first of June wrote to him to assure 
him that the story was wholly without foundation. 
Upon this Mr. Carlyle commenced a careful enquiry 
into it, and the point which is encouraging is this, 
that although the story related to an event nearly 
fifty years old, still the means were found, when 
sought, of effectually disproving it; for the official 
letter of the French captain of Le Vengeur to the 
Committee of Public Safety still exists, and on re¬ 
ference to it, it appeared that it was written on 
board of a British ship; that the Vengeur had 
struck a , and that her captain and some of her men 
had been removed out of her, and some British sea¬ 
men sent on board to take possession. She sank, it 
is true, and many of her crew were lost in her; but 
she sank as a British prize, and the British party who 
had taken possession of her were unhappily lost in 
her also. The fictitious statement was merely one 


a It so happened that I had been myself aware of the falsehood 
of the common story for many years, and was sorry to see it re¬ 
peated by Mr. Carlyle in his History of the French Revolution. 
It is more than thirty years since I read a MS. account of the 
part taken by H. M. S. Brunswick, Captain John Harvey, in the 
action of the first of June. The account was drawn up by one of 
the surviving officers of the Brunswick, Captain Hai\ey having 
been mortally wounded in the action, and was in the possession of 
Captain Harvey s family. It was very circumstantial, and as the 
Vengeur was particularly engaged with the Brunswick, it neces¬ 
sarily described her fate, and effectually contradicted the story in¬ 
vented by Barrere. 


296 


LECTURE VIII. 


of Barrere’s accustomed flourishes, inserted by him in 
his report of the action, and from thence copied by 
French writers first, and afterwards by foreigners. 
Now here was a case where the truth was found with 
perfect ease as soon as it was sought after; and the 
story might have been suspected from the quarter in 
which it originally appeared, as also from its internal 
character; for although cases of the most heroic self- 
devotion in war are nothing strange or suspicious, yet 
there was a theatrical display about this story which 
did call for examination. And as in this instance % 
so it is I think generally: that where there is not 
merely a willingness to receive the truth, but a real 

a The interest which we all feel in every thing relating to Nel¬ 
son will be a sufficient excuse for my inserting in this place a cor¬ 
rection of a statement in Southey’s Life of him, which, as there 
given, imputes a very unworthy and childish vanity to him, of 
which on that particular occasion he was wholly innocent. It is 
said that Nelson wore on the day of the action of Trafalgar, “ his 
admiral’s frock coat, hearing on the left breast four stars,” that his 
officers wished to speak to him on the subject, hut were afraid to 
do so, knowing that it was useless; he having said on a former 
occasion, when requested to change his dress or to cover his stars, 
<s In honour I gained them, and in honour I will die with them.” 
The truth is, that Nelson wore on the day of Trafalgar the same 
coat which he had commonly worn for weeks, on which the order 
of the Bath was embroidered, as was then usual. Sir Thomas 
Hardy did notice it to him, observing that he was afraid the 
badge might he marked by the enemy; to which Nelson replied, 
“ that he was aw r are of that, but that it was too late then to shift a 
coat.” This account rests on the authority of Sir Thomas Hardy, 
from whom it was heard by Captain Smyth, and by him commu¬ 
nicated to me. 


LECTURE VIII. 


297 


earnest desire to discover it, the truth may almost 
surely be found. 

I suppose then that what is wanted to constitute 
a trustworthy historian, is such an active impatience 
of error and desire of truth. And it will be seen at 
once that these qualities are intellectual as well as 
moral, and are as incompatible with great feebleness 
of mind as they are with dishonesty. For a feeble 
mind, and the same holds good also of an ignorant 
mind, is by no means impatient of error, because it 
does not readily suspect it; it may reject it when 
it is made to notice it, but otherwise it suffers it 
patiently and confounds it with truth. Now if this 
love of truth will make a trustworthy historian, so it 
will enable us no less to judge of what is trust¬ 
worthy history; and to suspect error on the one 
hand, and to appreciate truth on the other; and if 
it will not enable us to discover what the truth is, 
supposing that it has nowhere been given, for then 
it can only be discovered by direct historical re¬ 
searches of our own, yet to miss the truth where it 
really is not, is in itself no mean knowledge, and the 
same power which enables us to do this will enable 
us also, to a considerable degree, to discern where 
the truth lies hid, if we have not ourselves the time 
or the opportunity to bring it to light. 

First of all then, in estimating whether any his¬ 
tory is trustworthy or no, I should not ask whether 
it was written by a contemporary, or by one engaged 
in the transactions which it describes, but whether 
it was written by one who loves the truth with all 


298 


LECTURE VIII. 


his heart, and cannot endure error. For such an 
one, we may be sure, would never attempt to write 
a history if he had no means of writing it truly; and 
therefore although distant in time or place, or both, 
from the events which he describes, yet we may be 
satisfied that he had sources of good information at 
his command, or else that he would never have 
written at all. 

Such an historian is not indeed infallible, or ex¬ 
empt from actual error, but yet he is deserving of 
the fullest confidence in his general narrative; to be 
believed safely, unless we happen to have very strong 
reasons for doubting him in any one particular point. 
But such historians are in the highest degree rare; 
and the question practically is, how can we supply 
their want, and by the same qualities of mind in our¬ 
selves can extract a trustworthy history from that 
which in itself is not completely trustworthy; set¬ 
ting aside the rubbish and fastening upon the frag¬ 
ments of precious stone which may be mixed up 
with it. Let the historian be whoever he may, 
and if he does not appear to belong to the class of 
those who are essentially trustworthy, let us subject 
him to some such examination as the following. 

His date, his country, and the circumstances of his 
life, may be easily learned from a common biogra¬ 
phical dictionary; and though these points are not of 
the greatest importance of all, yet they are useful as 
intimating what particular influences we may suspect 
to have been at work upon his mind, and where 
therefore we should be particularly upon our guard. 


LECTURE VIII. 


299 


But the main thing to look to is of course his work 
itself. Here the very style gives us an impression 
by no means to be despised. If it is very heavy 
and cumbrous, it indicates either a dull man, or a 
pompous man, or at least a slow and awkward man; 
if it be tawdry and full of commonplaces enunciated 
with great solemnity, the writer is most likely a silly 
man; if it be highly antithetical, and full of unusual 
expressions, or artificial ways of stating a plain thing, 
the writer is clearly an affected man. If it be plain 
and simple, always clear, but never eloquent, the 
writer may be a very sensible man but is too hard and 
dry to be a very great man. If, on the other hand, 
it is always eloquent, rich in illustrations, full of ani¬ 
mation, but too uniformly so, and without the relief 
of simple and quiet passages, we must admire the 
writer’s genius in a very high degree, but we may 
fear that he is too continually excited to have at¬ 
tained to the highest wisdom; for that is necessarily 
calm. In this manner the mere language of an 
historian will furnish us with something of a key to 
his mind, and will tell us, or at least give us cause 
to presume, in what his main strength lies, and in 
what he is deficient. 

The style of a book impresses us immediately; 
but proceeding to the matter, it is of importance to 
observe from *vhat sources the historian has derived 
his information. This we ought always to be able to 
discover, by looking at the authorities referred to in 
the margin or at the bottom of the page; it is a most 
unpardonable fault if these are omitted. We should 


300 


LECTURE Vlir. 


consider these authorities as to quantity and quality; 
as to quantity, for if they are but few, we may feel 
sure that the historian’s knowledge is meagre : the 
materials for modern history are ample, and if only a 
few out of so many have been consulted, the historian 
is not equal to his task. Consider the richness and 
variety of Gibbon’s references, and of Niebuhr’s even 
more, when we know how few the obvious sources 
were for the period with which he was engaged. 
Then as to quality, we should observe, first, whether 
they consist of writers of one country or of several, of 
all the countries, that is, to which the history directly 
relates; secondly, whether they consist of historians 
only, or whether more miscellaneous sources of in¬ 
formation have been referred to; thirdly, what is the 
character of the authorities most relied on. Are 
they really the best that could have been found or 
no ? and if they are, then what are their particular 
qualities and tendencies ? was the historian aware of 
these and on his guard against them, or no? By 
this process we shall be enabled to estimate the 
depth and richness of our historian’s knowledge, and 
also in some measure his judgment as shewn in the 
choice of his authorities, and in his appreciation of 
their just value, knowing where they might be 
trusted implicitly and where suspected. 

We may now carry our judgment a* little farther, 
by examining an historian in greater detail; by ob¬ 
serving him as a military historian, we will say, as 
an historian of political contests, as an historian 
of church matters, and so on. In military history, 


LECTURE VIII. 


301 


for instance, there is first the question, Is he a 
good geographer? for if not, he cannot be a good 
military historian. Next let us observe his temper; 
Does he love exaggerations, does he give us accounts 
of a handful of men defeating a multitude; is one 
side always victorious and always heroic, is the other 
always defeated, always cruel, or blundering, or 
cowardly ? Or is he an unbeliever in all heroism, a 
man who brings every thing down to the level of a 
common mediocrity; to whose notions, soldiers care 
for nothing but pay or plunder, and war is an ex¬ 
pensive folly, with no fruit but an empty glory? 
Depend upon it that the truth has not been found 
by writers of either of these two classes. And so in 
political history. Is the historian a master of his 
science, can he separate the perpetual from the tem¬ 
porary, the essential from the accidental; in the 
strife of parties, does he understand the game or de¬ 
scribe the moves at random? Party partialities, if 
they do not agree with our own, we are apt enough 
to suspect, and even to exaggerate; but do we rightly 
know what partiality is ? Do we confound a decided 
preference for one cause above another, with a 
misrepresentation of the acts and characters of the 
men engaged; and think that a writer cannot be im¬ 
partial unless he is really ignorant or indifferent ? It 
is partiality if our love of the cause blind us to the 
faults of its supporters, or our hatred of the cause 
make us unjust to the virtues of its advocates. But 
it is not partiality to say that the support of a bad 
cause is itself evil, the support of a good cause is it- 


302 


LECTURE VIII. 


self good. It is not partiality to say, that the self¬ 
same political acts, as for example acts of sovereign 
power exercised beyond the ordinary law, are, accord¬ 
ing to the cause for which they are done, either to 
be justified or condemned; and the actor is to be 
justified or condemned personally, according to the 
cause for which he acted, and the purity of his own 
motives in acting, as shewn by his subsequent con¬ 
duct. Of course this does not in the least degree 
apply to actions morally wrong, such as falsehood, or 
individual injustice or cruelty; for to make the end 
justify such, were to hold that evil may be done that 
good may come. But in political actions the moral 
character of the act depends mainly on the object 
and motive of it; the written law may yield to the 
higher unwritten law, but not to selfish tyranny or in¬ 
justice. Undoubtedly in such cases the temptations 
to the actor and to the historian are obvious; in¬ 
justice in deed and in judgment lie with both close 
at the door. Nevertheless if there be such a thing 
as political truth, a good and an evil in the internal 
contests of parties, it seems certain that what would 
pretend to be impartiality is very often ignorance or 
indifferentism, and that an historian may be called 
partial by the vulgar, when he is in fact only seeing 
more clearly and weighing more evenly the respective 
claims of truth and falsehood, good and evil. 

Such an examination will enable us, I think, 
sometimes to discover with certainty, and always to 
suspect with probability, where an historian’s narra¬ 
tive is untrustworthy. And where it seems to be so, 


LECTURE VIII. 


303 


tlieie ve should compare it with some other narra- 
ti\e, written, if it may be, by an author of opinions 
very unlike those of our first historian. If the sus¬ 
pected defect relate to some particular matter of fact, 
then to check it is of course easv; if it consist in 
general meagerness or poverty of information, another 
history by a different writer will most probably make 
up its deficiencies ; if it consist in a wrong and narrow 
judgment of the whole state of things described, an 
opposite view may in part at least correct this also. 
But it should be remembered that for the mere outline 
of events, which is all that we need for many portions 
of history, all historians are trustworthy; the dif¬ 
ficulty does but relate to details, and occurs there¬ 
fore but rarely; for, as I have said before, it is ab¬ 
solutely impossible to study the mass of history in de¬ 
tail, w r e must be contented to know the mere heads of 
it, and to reserve minute enquiries into it for the time 
when we shall have some particular call to study it. 

After all, history presents to many minds an un¬ 
satisfactory aspect, because it is a perpetual study of 
particulars, without any certainly acknowledged law; 
and though our knowledge of general laws may here, 
as well as in natural science, be drawn from an in¬ 
duction of particular instances, yet it is not in natu¬ 
ral science required of every student to go through 
this process for himself; the laws have been found 
out for him by others, and to these his attention is 
directed. Whereas in history, the laws of the science 
are kept out of sight, perhaps are not known, and he 


304 


LECTURE VIIJ. 


is turned adrift, as it were, on a wide sea, to navigate 
it as he best can, and take his own soundings and 
make his own surveys. 

Now allowing the great beauty and interest of his¬ 
tory as a series of particular pictures, not by any 
means barren in matter for reflection, but in the 
highest degree rich and instructive ; transcending all 
the most curious details of natural history, in the 
ratio of man’s superiority over the brute creation; 
yet I think that we must confess and deplore that 
its scientific character has not been yet sufficiently 
made out; there hangs an uncertainty about its laws 
which to most persons is very perplexing. Why is 
it for example that we here, holding in common, as 
we certainly do, our principles of religious and moral 
truth, should yet regard political questions so differ¬ 
ently ? that the history of our own great civil war, 
for instance, reads to different persons so different a 
lesson, so that we cannot touch upon it without being 
sure to encounter a strong opposition to whatever 
opinions we may maintain respecting it ? It is very 
true that some of this opposition may arise from 
simple ignorance, and then the study of the history 
may modify or remove it; but let a man read, if it 
be possible, every existing document relating to the 
facts of those times, and is it quite certain that his 
conclusions will be precisely the same with those of 
another man who may have gone through the same 
process ? History, therefore, does not seem to be 
sufficient to the right understanding of itself; its 


LECTURE VIII. 


305 


laws, which, as it seems, ought to be established from 
its facts, appear even with a full knowledge of the 
facts before us, to be yet infinitely disputable. 

I confess that if I believed them to be as really 
disputable as they have been disputed, the pain of 
such a conviction would be most grievous to bear. I 
am firmly persuaded, on the contrary, that setting out 
with those views of man which we find in the Scrip¬ 
tures, and with those plain moral notions which the 
Scriptures do not so much teach as suppose to exist 
in us, and sanction; the laws of history, in other 
words, the laws of political science, using “ political ” 
in the most exalted sense of the term, as expressing 
the highest 7roXm/c?) of the Greek philosophers, may 
be deduced, or, if you will, may be confirmed from 
it with perfect certainty, with a certainty equal to 
that of the most undoubted truths of morals. And 
if in this or in any former lectures I have seemed to 
express or to imply a very firm conviction on points 
which I well know to be warmly disputed, it is 
because these laws being to my own mind absolutely 
certain, the lessons of any particular portion of his¬ 
tory, supposing that the facts are known to us, 
appear to be certain also; and daily experience can 
scarcely remove my wonder at finding they do not 
appear so to others. 

That they do not appear so, however, is un¬ 
doubtedly a phenomenon to be accounted for. And 
hard as it is, almost I think impossible, to doubt con¬ 
clusions which seem both in the way by which we 
arrived at them originally, and in their consistency 

x 


300 


LECTURE VIII. 


with one another, and in their offering a key to all 
manner of difficulties, and in their never having met 
with any objection which we could not readily answer, 
to command absolutely our mind’s assent; still I 
allow, that if they convinced no minds but ours, or 

if being generally disputed or doubted we could in 

# 

no way account satisfactorily for the fact of such a 
doubt respecting them, we should be driven to the 
extremity of scepticism; truth would appear indeed 
to be a thing utterly unreal or utterly unattainable. 
Now on the contrary, what appear to me to be the 
laws of history, contain in them no single paradox ; 
there is no step in the process by which we arrive at 
them which is not absolutely confirmed by the sanction 
of the highest authorities; and the doubt respecting 
them appears to arise partly because men have not 
always viewed them in combination with one another, 
in which state one modifies another, and removes or 
lessens what might appear strange in each separately; 
and partly because in regarding any one period of 
history, our perception of the general law is ob¬ 
scured by circumstances which interfere with its 
regular operation, and thus lead many to doubt its 
existence. 

But in speaking of the certainty of the laws of po¬ 
litical science, I mean only that there are principles 
of government, undoubtedly good in themselves, and 
tending to the happiness of mankind; and that when¬ 
ever these principles appear not to have produced 
good, it is owing to some disturbing causes which 
may be clearly pointed out, or to the absence of 


LECTURE VIII. 


307 


something which was their proper consequence, and 
the omission of which in its season left them without 
their natural fruit; but that although the principles 
may thus be impeded by untoward circumstances, or 
fail to bring forth their consequences in any given 
case, as it is not every blossom which is succeeded 
by its fruit, yet they are an essential condition of the 
birth of fruit, and to oppose them, instead of further¬ 
ing and perfecting their work, and helping to make 
them fruitful, is merely to uphold what is bad; so 
that there is on one side, it may be, an ineffectual, or 
even an abused good, on the other hand there is a 
positive evil. 

But one great question still remains; if history 
has its laws, as I entirely believe; if theoretically 
considered it is not a mere aggregation of particular 
actions or characters, like the anecdotes of natural his¬ 
tory, but is besides this the witness to general moral 
and political truths, and capable, when rightly used, 
of bringing to our notice fresh truths which we might 
not have gained by a 'priori reasoning only ; still, it 
may be asked, is this theoretical knowledge avail¬ 
able ? Can the truths which it teaches us to value be 
really carried into effect practically, or are we rather 
cursed with that bitter thing, a powerless knowledge, 
seeing an evil from which we cannot escape, and a 
good to which we cannot attain; being in fact em¬ 
barked upon the rapids of fate, which hurry us along 
to the top of the fall, and then dash us down below; 
while all the while, there are the banks on the right 
and left close in sight, an assured and visible safety 

x 2 


308 


LECTURE VIII. 


if we could but reach it, but we try to steer and to 
pull our boat thither in vain; and with eyes open, 
and amidst unavailing struggles, we are swept away 
to destruction ? This is the belief of some of no 
mean name or ability; who hold that the destiny of 
the present and future was fixed irrevocably by the 
past, and that the greatest efforts of individuals can 
do nothing against it, nay, that they are rather dis¬ 
posed by an overruling power to be apparently the 
instruments in bringing it to pass. While others 
hold that great men can control fate itself, that there 
is an energy in the human will which can as it were 
restore life to the dead; and snap asunder the links 
of the chain of destiny, even when they have been 
multiplied around us by the toil of centuries. 

Now practically there is an end of this question 
altogether, if the power of this supposed fate goes so 
far as to make us its willing instruments; I mean, if 
the influences of our time, determined themselves by 
the influence of a past time, do in their turn deter¬ 
mine our characters; if we admire, abhor, hope, fear, 
desire, or flee from, the very objects and no others 
which an irresistible law of our condition sets before 
us. For to ask whether a slave who loves his chains 
can break them, is but an idle question ; because it 
is certain that he will not. And if we in like man¬ 
ner think according to a fixed law, viewing things 
in our generation as beings born in such a generation 
must view them, then it is evident that our deliver¬ 
ance must proceed wholly from a higher power; be¬ 
fore the outward bondage can be broken, we must 


LECTURE VIII. 


309 


be set at liberty within. The only question which 
can be of importance to us is this, whether, if our 
minds be free, our actions can compass what we de¬ 
sire ; whether, perceiving the influence of our times, 
and struggling against it, we can resist it with suc¬ 
cess ; whether the natural consequences of the mis¬ 
doings of past generations can be averted now, or 
whether such late repentance be unavailing. 

And here surely the answer is such as we should 
most desire to be the true one; an answer en¬ 
couraging exertion, yet making the responsibility of 
every generation exceedingly great, and forbidding 
us to think that in us or in our actions is placed the 
turning power of the fortunes of the world. I do 
not suppose that any state of things can be conceived 
so bad as that the efforts of good men, working in 
the faith of God, can do nothing to amend it; yet 
on the other hand, the evil may be far too deeply 
rooted to be altogether removed; nor would it be 
possible for the greatest individual efforts to undo the 
effect of past errors or crimes, so that it should be 
the same thing whether they had ever been commit¬ 
ted or no. It has been said, Conceive Frederick the 
Great in the place of Louis the Sixteenth on the morn¬ 
ing of the 10th of August, 1792, and would not the 
future history of the Revolution have been altogether 
different ? But the more reasonable case to conceive 
would be rather, that Louis the Sixteenth had been 
endowed, not on that one day of the 10th of August, 
but from his early youth, with the virtue and firm¬ 
ness of Louis the Ninth, together with the genius of 


310 


LECTURE VIII. 


Frederick or of Napoleon. What would have been 
the difference in the history of France then? lliat 
there would have been a great difference I doubt 
not, yet were the evils such as no human virtue and 
wisdom could have altogether undone. No living 
man could have removed that deep suspicion and ab¬ 
horrence entertained for the existing church and 
clergy which made the people incredulous of all vir¬ 
tue in an individual priest, because they were so fully 
possessed with the impression of the falsehood and 
evil of the system. Nor, in like manner, could any 
one have reconciled the peasants throughout France 
to the landed proprietors; the feeling of hatred was 
become too strong to be appeased, because here too 
it was mixed with intense suspicion, the result ine¬ 
vitably of suffering and ignorance, and nothing but 
the overthrow of those against whom it was directed, 
could have satisfied it. Yet high virtue and ability 
in the king would have in all probability both 
softened the violence of the convulsion, and shortened 
its duration; and by saving himself from becoming 
its victim, there would have been one at hand with 
acknowledged authority and power to reconstruct 
the frame of society not only sooner but better than 
it was reconstructed actually; and the monarchy at 
least, among the old institutions of France, would 
have retained the love of the people, and would 
have been one precious link to connect the present 
with the past, instead of all links being severed to¬ 
gether, and old France being separated by an im¬ 
passable gulf from the new. 


LECTURE VIII. 


811 


A greater accuracy as to tlie determining of this 
question does not seem to be attainable. We know 
that evil committed is in certain cases, and beyond a 
certain degree, irremediable; I do not say, not to be 
palliated or softened as to its consequences, but not 
to be wholly removed. And we know also that the 
blessing of individual goodness has been felt in very 
evil times, not only by itself, but by others. What, 
or what amount of evil is incurable, or how widely 
or deeply individual good may become a blessing 
amidst prevailing evil, we are not allowed to deter¬ 
mine or to know. God’s national judgments are 
spoken of in Scripture both as reversible and irre¬ 
versible ; for Ahab’s repentance the threatened evil 
was delayed, yet afterwards the cup of Judah’s sin 
was so full, that the reward of Josiah’s goodness was 
his own being early taken away from the evil to 
come, not the reversal nor even the postponement of 
the sentence against his country. Surely it is enough 
to know that our sin now may render unavailing the 
greatest goodness of our posterity; our efforts for 
good may be permitted to remove, or at any rate to 
mitigate, the curse of our fathers’ sin. 

Here then the present introductory course of lec¬ 
tures shall close. There is in all things a compensa¬ 
tion whether of good or evil; and as the subject of 
modern history is of all others to my mind the most 
interesting, inasmuch as it includes all questions of 
the deepest interest relating not to human things 
only, but to divine, so the intermixture of evil is, 


312 


LECTURE VIII. 


that for this very reason it is of all subjects the most 
delicate to treat of before a mixed audience. Shar¬ 
ing thus much in common with religious subjects, 
that no man feels himself to be a mere learner in it, 
but also in many respects a judge of what he hears, 
it has this farther difficulty, that the preacher speak¬ 
ing to members of the same church with himself 
speaks necessarily to men whose religious opinions in 
the main agree with his own; but he who speaks on 

9 

modern history, even to members of the same nation 
and commonwealth, speaks to those whose political 
opinions may differ from his own very deeply, who 
therefore are sure not only to judge what they hear, 
but to condemn it. And however much, when pro¬ 
voked by opposition, we may even feel pleasure in 
stating our opinions in their broadest form, yet he 
must be of a different constitution of mind from 
mine, who can like to do this unprovoked, who 
can wish in the discharge of a public duty in our 
own common University, to embitter our academi¬ 
cal studies with controversy, to excite angry feel¬ 
ings in a place where he has never met with any 
thing but kindness, a place connected in his mind 
with recollections, associations, and actual feelings, 
the most prized and most delightful. Only, it must 
be remembered, that if modern history be studied at 
all, he who speaks upon it officially, must speak as 
he would do on any other matter, simply and fully; 
expounding it according to his ability and convictions ; 
not disguising or suppressing what he believes to be 


LECTURE VIII. 


313 


necessary to the right understanding of it, although 
it may sometimes cost him a painful effort. But in 
the lectures which I would propose to deliver next 
year, our business will be less embarrassing. We 
shall then be engaged with a remote period, where 
the forms of our present parties were unknown; and 
our object will be to endeavour to represent to our¬ 
selves the England of the fourteenth century. To 
represent it, if we can, even in its outward aspect; 
for I cannot think that the changes in the face of 
the country are beneath the notice of history: what 
supplied the place of the landscape which is now so 
familiar to us ; what it w T as before five hundred 
years of what I may call the wear and tear of hu¬ 
man dominion ; when cultivation had scarcely ven¬ 
tured beyond the valleys, or the low sunny slopes of 
the neighbouring hills; and wdiole tracts now swarm¬ 
ing with inhabitants, were a wide solitude of forest 
or of moor. To represent it also in its institutions, 
and its state of society; and farther in its individual 
men and in their actions; for I w’ould never wish the 
results of history to be separated from history itself: 
the great events of past times require to be repre¬ 
sented no less than institutions, or manners, or build¬ 
ings, or scenery: we must listen to the stir of gather¬ 
ing war; we must follow our two Edwards, the 
second and third, on their enterprises visited with 
such different fortune; we must be present at the 
rout and flight of Bannockburn, and at the triumph of 
Crecy. Finally, we must remember also not so to 


314 


LECTURE VIII. 


transport ourselves into the fourteenth century as to 
forget that we belong really to the nineteenth ; that 
here, and not there, lie our duties ; that the harvest 
gathered in the fields of the past, is to be brought 
home for the use of the present: avoiding the fault 
of that admirable painter of the middle ages, M. 
de Barante, who, having shewn himself most capa¬ 
ble of analyzing history philosophically, and having 
described the literature of France in the eighteenth 
century in a work not to be surpassed for its mingled 
beauty and profoundness, has yet chosen in his his¬ 
tory of the Dukes of Burgundy to forfeit the benefits 
of his own wisdom, and has described the fourteenth 
and fifteenth centuries no otherwise than might have 
been done by their own simple chroniclers. An exam¬ 
ple, one amongst a thousand, how men in their dread 
of one extreme, the extreme in this case of writing 
mere discussions upon history instead of history itself 
are apt to fall into another not less distant from the 
true mean. 

The experience of this year has given me the most 
encouraging assurance that the subject of modern his¬ 
tory is felt to be full of interest. Those who study 
it for themselves, will certainly find its interest grow 
upon them; it will not then be perilled, to apply an 
expression of Thucydides a , upon the capacity of a lec¬ 
turer, according as he may lecture with more or less 
of ability and knowledge. For we here are not 


a II. 35. 


LECTURE VIII. 


315 


likely to run away with the foolish notion, that lec¬ 
tures can teach us a science without careful study of 
our own. They can but excite us to begin to work 
for ourselves; possibly they may assist our efforts; 
they can in no way supersede them. 


THE END, 


« 


G. Woodfall and Son, Printers, Angel Court, Skinner Street, London, 





























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